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I think when some people say “self hosting is expensive” they factor in the cost of the engineering talent necessary to successfully sysadmin the setup and ongo

I think when some people say “self hosting is expensive” they factor in the cost of the engineering talent necessary to successfully sysadmin the setup and ongoing maintenance - and the cost/risk of shopping for and evaluating that skillset to find and retain an engineer that isn’t going to muck the whole thing up. You can subsidize the cost of self hosting by discounting your time/skill in DIY - and you don’t have to interview yourself.

dijit 1y ago
Yes, I get that. However there are SREs and DevOps engineers that are seemingly required for cloud solutions; and they cost more than sysadmins. So, someone is lying somewhere.
- r3trohack3r 1y ago
  SREs have nothing to do with cloud solutions. You may have the wrong mental model here. The profession grew out of observations made in catastrophic failures like Chernobyl. They primarily focus on organization structures, communication structures, and responding to failures. At an engineering level they focus on meta stability - decoupling local failure from overall system stability to prevent local failures from cascading to catastrophic failures - and automated tooling to loop the right engineers into ongoing incidents. The skill set is a side effect of operating at scale, where even brief catastrophic failures can result in hundreds of millions of dollars of losses; directly in revenue and indirectly to reputation.
  - jeremyjh 1y ago
    That's what it meant 8 years ago. Now SRE is just a synonym for "devops" which now is a synonym for "sysadmin" in most companies. You won't have both devops and SREs in most orgs, and you won't have any devops doing dev work.
    - r3trohack3r 1y ago
      If you’re fighting snake oil and buzzwords, you gripe isn’t with the cloud. You can “buzzword” yourself into job security just as easily on a VM.
mrweasel 1y ago
> they factor in the cost of the engineering talent necessary You need to do that for cloud as well. The assumption that you can just get the developers to spin up what they need doesn't work. You need a team of "cloud engineers" if you don't want your cloud bill to go crazy. I know a few people that does AWS for clients, they basically spend all their time maintaining, upgrading and reworking things to reduce the cost. In one example, when AWS changed their IPv4 pricing, one of the went in an managed to remove 90% of their public IPv4 usage. You need to say on top of the cloud platforms, ensuring that costs stay low is a full time job.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

dijit 1y ago

Yes, I get that. However there are SREs and DevOps engineers that are seemingly required for cloud solutions; and they cost more than sysadmins. So, someone is lying somewhere.

r3trohack3r 1y ago
SREs have nothing to do with cloud solutions. You may have the wrong mental model here. The profession grew out of observations made in catastrophic failures like Chernobyl. They primarily focus on organization structures, communication structures, and responding to failures. At an engineering level they focus on meta stability - decoupling local failure from overall system stability to prevent local failures from cascading to catastrophic failures - and automated tooling to loop the right engineers into ongoing incidents. The skill set is a side effect of operating at scale, where even brief catastrophic failures can result in hundreds of millions of dollars of losses; directly in revenue and indirectly to reputation.
- jeremyjh 1y ago
  That's what it meant 8 years ago. Now SRE is just a synonym for "devops" which now is a synonym for "sysadmin" in most companies. You won't have both devops and SREs in most orgs, and you won't have any devops doing dev work.
  - r3trohack3r 1y ago
    If you’re fighting snake oil and buzzwords, you gripe isn’t with the cloud. You can “buzzword” yourself into job security just as easily on a VM.

mrweasel 1y ago

> they factor in the cost of the engineering talent necessary You need to do that for cloud as well. The assumption that you can just get the developers to spin up what they need doesn't work. You need a team of "cloud engineers" if you don't want your cloud bill to go crazy. I know a few people that does AWS for clients, they basically spend all their time maintaining, upgrading and reworking things to reduce the cost. In one example, when AWS changed their IPv4 pricing, one of the went in an managed to remove 90% of their public IPv4 usage. You need to say on top of the cloud platforms, ensuring that costs stay low is a full time job.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]