4 ms·

I wonder if the savings includes the cost of labor to maintain the physical servers, cabling, performance and security security monitoring, etc. Not saying it d

I wonder if the savings includes the cost of labor to maintain the physical servers, cabling, performance and security security monitoring, etc. Not saying it doesn't, I just wonder.

znpy 2y ago
> I wonder if the savings includes the cost of labor to maintain the physical servers, cabling, This appears to be a valid point, but it really isn't. In a case you're paying sysadmins, in the other you're paying cloud engineers. > performance and security security monitoring, etc. Not saying it doesn't, I just wonder. You'd be paying those anyways. AWS's mantra is that amazon takes care OF the security of the cloud but YOU (the client company) take care of the security IN the cloud. Same goes for performance etc.
- exe34 2y ago
  from listening to people who work with aws talking about their work, I don't get the impression they save any time - it's just different stuff. they're constantly doing things with permissions, setting up something or other, trying to work out why something can't find something else - it doesn't just magically solve all your problems. presumably once you figure out everything for you 2000 customers you can scale to a billion with just your credit card info, but most people won't work on stuff that scales to billions of users.
  - vidarh 2y ago
    Indeed, I offer consultancy for both cloud-based clients and ones using managed hosting like Hetzner, and colo'ed own servers, and the clients who host in the cloud routinely need more of my time on a per-server/instance basis. Most of the time when people bring up these costs they have no experience with modern server hardware, and hosting. You can have the server shipped directly to a colo, you can file tickets with the provider to have it plugged into your power bar and your network, and you can connect with your IPMI client and set it to boot from your PXE/bootp/tftp server to get an install image. With a well-configured setup, you have a one-off cost to set up your firewalls, wire-up the switches and power bars, and set up a server for the rest to network boot off, and the rest of bringing up your servers is near automatic and most management can be done remotely via IPMI or similar. It's not the 90's any more.
    - Winsaucerer 2y ago
      Sounds like the real challenge is experience/skill then? Easier to find people who know how to use AWS/Azure/GCP, than know either (a) your colo'ed setup, or (b) how to do a good appropriate modern colo setup. (this is a question disguised as a statement, since I'm interested in your opinion)
      - vidarh 2y ago
        There is something to that, though these skills are fairly easy to buy. Lots of consultancies like mine offer management of these things on retainer. But a lot of developers have passing knowledge of AWS etc., but none with managed hosting and might well prefer the cloud options for that reasons. Poorly managed old managed setups also probabl burned a lot of more experienced people. E.g. if you had to fill in stupid forms and request a server weeks ahead, odds are cloud equals freedom in your mind, even though a well run infra setup could offer you to spin up container workloads and leave dealing with adding capacity as a background concern developers don't need to think about. Personally, I recall well the time I had to call in to Yahoo's hardware review board, chaired by one of the founders (Filo) because the billing system I managed, which handled millions of dollars worth of transactions, needed a new database server - priced around $10k. There were at least a dozen senior people on that call. If that was your experience of colo/managed servers/on prem, it's not unsurprising if you value cloud services far higher than their costs for the sake of avoiding that bureaucracy. I'm working on tooling that I hope will change that, by making compute and storage on cheaper managed providers vs. cloud providers fungible commodities, but it's a hard problem.
  - sebazzz 2y ago
    > I don't get the impression they save any time - it's just different stuff. they're constantly doing things with permissions Permissions in the cloud is whole other beast, especially in Azure. You can easily spend a week figuring out various managed identity issues. As for time saving: I've noticed cloud engineers often build a huge contraption of Terraform, Ansible scripts then bots and processes around them. That is then where the focus and time goes too. And with any software, it is never done. It can always be better. Classic sysops is much faster in a state of "done, no need to touch it now".
Tractor8626 2y ago
I'm pretty sure cabling is included in cost of renting space in datacenter.

I wonder if the savings includes the cost of labor to maintain the physical servers, cabling, performance and security security monitoring, etc. Not saying it doesn't, I just wonder.

znpy 2y ago

> I wonder if the savings includes the cost of labor to maintain the physical servers, cabling, This appears to be a valid point, but it really isn't. In a case you're paying sysadmins, in the other you're paying cloud engineers. > performance and security security monitoring, etc. Not saying it doesn't, I just wonder. You'd be paying those anyways. AWS's mantra is that amazon takes care OF the security of the cloud but YOU (the client company) take care of the security IN the cloud. Same goes for performance etc.

exe34 2y ago
from listening to people who work with aws talking about their work, I don't get the impression they save any time - it's just different stuff. they're constantly doing things with permissions, setting up something or other, trying to work out why something can't find something else - it doesn't just magically solve all your problems. presumably once you figure out everything for you 2000 customers you can scale to a billion with just your credit card info, but most people won't work on stuff that scales to billions of users.
- vidarh 2y ago
  Indeed, I offer consultancy for both cloud-based clients and ones using managed hosting like Hetzner, and colo'ed own servers, and the clients who host in the cloud routinely need more of my time on a per-server/instance basis. Most of the time when people bring up these costs they have no experience with modern server hardware, and hosting. You can have the server shipped directly to a colo, you can file tickets with the provider to have it plugged into your power bar and your network, and you can connect with your IPMI client and set it to boot from your PXE/bootp/tftp server to get an install image. With a well-configured setup, you have a one-off cost to set up your firewalls, wire-up the switches and power bars, and set up a server for the rest to network boot off, and the rest of bringing up your servers is near automatic and most management can be done remotely via IPMI or similar. It's not the 90's any more.
  - Winsaucerer 2y ago
    Sounds like the real challenge is experience/skill then? Easier to find people who know how to use AWS/Azure/GCP, than know either (a) your colo'ed setup, or (b) how to do a good appropriate modern colo setup. (this is a question disguised as a statement, since I'm interested in your opinion)
    - vidarh 2y ago
      There is something to that, though these skills are fairly easy to buy. Lots of consultancies like mine offer management of these things on retainer. But a lot of developers have passing knowledge of AWS etc., but none with managed hosting and might well prefer the cloud options for that reasons. Poorly managed old managed setups also probabl burned a lot of more experienced people. E.g. if you had to fill in stupid forms and request a server weeks ahead, odds are cloud equals freedom in your mind, even though a well run infra setup could offer you to spin up container workloads and leave dealing with adding capacity as a background concern developers don't need to think about. Personally, I recall well the time I had to call in to Yahoo's hardware review board, chaired by one of the founders (Filo) because the billing system I managed, which handled millions of dollars worth of transactions, needed a new database server - priced around $10k. There were at least a dozen senior people on that call. If that was your experience of colo/managed servers/on prem, it's not unsurprising if you value cloud services far higher than their costs for the sake of avoiding that bureaucracy. I'm working on tooling that I hope will change that, by making compute and storage on cheaper managed providers vs. cloud providers fungible commodities, but it's a hard problem.
- sebazzz 2y ago
  > I don't get the impression they save any time - it's just different stuff. they're constantly doing things with permissions Permissions in the cloud is whole other beast, especially in Azure. You can easily spend a week figuring out various managed identity issues. As for time saving: I've noticed cloud engineers often build a huge contraption of Terraform, Ansible scripts then bots and processes around them. That is then where the focus and time goes too. And with any software, it is never done. It can always be better. Classic sysops is much faster in a state of "done, no need to touch it now".

Tractor8626 2y ago

I'm pretty sure cabling is included in cost of renting space in datacenter.