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10x less money sounds impressive, but the actual savings is 15k a year - less than half what it would cost to hire a full-time sysadmin to keep things updated,

10x less money sounds impressive, but the actual savings is 15k a year - less than half what it would cost to hire a full-time sysadmin to keep things updated, running smoothly, backed up. And if you never hire a sysadmin? That’s ok, you’re spending the time to maintain it. 10h a week to keep things running smoothly means ~25 dollars per hour over the year. Do you earn more than that or is your time worth 25 an hour?

justinclift 2y ago
Sounds like there's no DevOps/SysAdmin staff needed when using the cloud? ;)
- deafpolygon 2y ago
  Never implied that. But it's much easier for an IT "department" of 1 to maintain a fleet of cloud services than a bunch of machines in a closet. When dealing with numbers like 15k/year... it's implied that we're not dealing with a full staff.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    So you hire someone who enjoys building computers in their free time instead of someone who is an AWS expert where both have a 0.2 loading on infra.
  - justinclift 2y ago
    > ... a fleet of cloud services than a bunch of machines in a closet. Maybe for a bunch of machines in a closet. But modern dedicated servers and similar are pretty easy to maintain. ;)
nirvdrum 2y ago
That savings is significant when bootstrapping. And the cloud costs often increase in short order. With a colo server you’re not having to worry about a runaway process or config issue skyrocketing costs. That $120 is fixed and there’s probably a ton of headroom in there for growth. It’s been several years since I’ve run a business, but I had moved from AWS to a colo ESXi setup. I saved a bunch of money and got a better product. My costs were fixed, the hardware was better, the VM sizes more configurable, and I had high availability. I wasn’t spending anywhere near 10h / week to keep it running. Linux and most daemons are pretty robust. I’d gladly acquire and exercise general sysadmin knowledge over some vendor-specific thing. AWS may run fine if you have a light load, but their API docs can lie, they have hidden constraints, and many apps end up using the wrong service or architecture and need to go through costly migrations. It’s hardly set it and forget it. There’s a ton of services and constraints to learn. There’s time involved in learning the tooling, the API, and the invariable bugs integrating with the devops tool of the day. Then you need to factor in the time spent trying to speed up your app to compensate for the slow cloud machine you’re running on. You can choose beefier machine types, but you’ll pay through the nose. Performance can be wildly inconsistent if you’re on an oversubscribed host. So, you can get a cloud bare metal machine, but that’s even more money and good luck getting the spend approved. To get out of that hole teams will often layer in brittle caching that would be otherwise unnecessary. These costs rarely get mentioned when we talk about cloud vs bare metal. That was a substantial time sink for the startups I was at. Large companies have whole teams dedicated to devops, which isn’t far off from having a traditional ops team.
snovv_crash 2y ago
In my experience maintaining a few wikis and blog sites, maintenance time of the entire server is something more like 10h per year, and even that is being pessimistic.

justinclift 2y ago

Sounds like there's no DevOps/SysAdmin staff needed when using the cloud? ;)

deafpolygon 2y ago
Never implied that. But it's much easier for an IT "department" of 1 to maintain a fleet of cloud services than a bunch of machines in a closet. When dealing with numbers like 15k/year... it's implied that we're not dealing with a full staff.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  So you hire someone who enjoys building computers in their free time instead of someone who is an AWS expert where both have a 0.2 loading on infra.
- justinclift 2y ago
  > ... a fleet of cloud services than a bunch of machines in a closet. Maybe for a bunch of machines in a closet. But modern dedicated servers and similar are pretty easy to maintain. ;)

nirvdrum 2y ago

That savings is significant when bootstrapping. And the cloud costs often increase in short order. With a colo server you’re not having to worry about a runaway process or config issue skyrocketing costs. That $120 is fixed and there’s probably a ton of headroom in there for growth. It’s been several years since I’ve run a business, but I had moved from AWS to a colo ESXi setup. I saved a bunch of money and got a better product. My costs were fixed, the hardware was better, the VM sizes more configurable, and I had high availability. I wasn’t spending anywhere near 10h / week to keep it running. Linux and most daemons are pretty robust. I’d gladly acquire and exercise general sysadmin knowledge over some vendor-specific thing. AWS may run fine if you have a light load, but their API docs can lie, they have hidden constraints, and many apps end up using the wrong service or architecture and need to go through costly migrations. It’s hardly set it and forget it. There’s a ton of services and constraints to learn. There’s time involved in learning the tooling, the API, and the invariable bugs integrating with the devops tool of the day. Then you need to factor in the time spent trying to speed up your app to compensate for the slow cloud machine you’re running on. You can choose beefier machine types, but you’ll pay through the nose. Performance can be wildly inconsistent if you’re on an oversubscribed host. So, you can get a cloud bare metal machine, but that’s even more money and good luck getting the spend approved. To get out of that hole teams will often layer in brittle caching that would be otherwise unnecessary. These costs rarely get mentioned when we talk about cloud vs bare metal. That was a substantial time sink for the startups I was at. Large companies have whole teams dedicated to devops, which isn’t far off from having a traditional ops team.

snovv_crash 2y ago

In my experience maintaining a few wikis and blog sites, maintenance time of the entire server is something more like 10h per year, and even that is being pessimistic.