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People are usually the biggest cost in any organisation. If you can run all your systems without the sysadmins & netadmins required to keep it all upright (espe
by kitd 1y ago
People are usually the biggest cost in any organisation. If you can run all your systems without the sysadmins & netadmins required to keep it all upright (especially at expensive times like weekends or run up to Black Friday/Xmas), you can save yourself a lot more than the extra it'll cost to get a cloud provider to do it all for you.
- HPsquared 1y agoThat's how they can get away with such seemingly high prices.
- chatmasta 1y agoI can’t believe this cloud propaganda remains so pervasive. You’re just paying DevOps and “cloud architects” instead.
- codegeek 1y agoExactly. It's sad that we have been brain washed by the cloud propaganda long enough now. Everyone and their mother thinks that to setup anything in production, you need cloud otherwise it is amaeteurish. Sad.
- ecshafer 1y agoEvery large organization that is all in on cloud I have worked at has several teams doing cloud work exclusively (CICD, Devops, SRE, etc), but every individual team is spending significant amounts of their time doing cloud development on top of that work.
- rcxdude 1y agoThis. There's a lot of talk of 'oh you will spend so much time managing your own hardware' when I've found in practice it's much less time than wrangling the cloud infrastructure. (Especially since the alternatives are usually still a hosting provider that mean you don't have to physically touch the hardware at all, though frankly that's often also an overblown amount of time. The building/internet/cooling is what costs money but there's already a wide array of co-location companies set up to provide exactly that)
- ecshafer 1y agoThe cost to run data-centers for a large company that is past the co-location phase, I am not sure where those calculations come out to. But yeah in my experience, running even a fairly large amount of bare metal nix servers in colocation facilities are really not that time consuming.
- epistasis 1y agoI think you are very right, and to be specific, IAM roles, connecting security groups, terraform plan/apply cycles, running Atlantis through GitHub, all that takes tremendous amounts of time and requires understanding a very large set of technologies on top of the basic networking/security/PostGRES knowledge.
- mjr00 1y agoYeah I always just kinda laugh at these comparisons, because it's usually coming from tech people who don't appreciate how much more valuable people's time is than raw opex. It's like saying, you know it's really dumb that we spend $4000 on Macbooks for everyone, we could just make everyone use Linux desktops and save a ton of money.
- grim_io 1y agoWhat is this?! You are self-managing expensive dedicated hardware in form of MacBooks, instead of renting Azure Windows VM's?! Shame!
- lozf 1y agoDon't be silly, - the MacBook Pro's are just used to RDP to the Azure Windows VMs ;)
- wredcoll 1y agoIf "cloud" took zero time, then sure. It actually takes a lot of time.
- mjr00 1y ago"It's actually really easy to set up Postgres with high availability and multi-region backups and pump logs to a central log source (which is also self-hosted)" is more or less equivalent to "it's actually really easy to set up Linux and use it as a desktop" In fact I'd wager a lot more people have used Linux than set up a proper redundant SQL database
- grim_io 1y agoHonestly, I don't see a big difference between learning the arcane non-standard, non-portable incantations needed to configure and use various forks of standard utilities running on the $CLOUD_PROVIDER, and learning to configure and run the actual service that is portable and completely standard. Okay, I lied. The later seems much more useful and sane.
- Arch-TK 1y agoWhat is more likely to fail? The hardware managed by Hetzner or your product? I'm not saying that you won't experience hardware failures, I am just saying that you also need to remember that if you want your product to keep working over the weekend then you must have someone ready to fix it over the weekend.
- grim_io 1y agoCloud providers and even cloudflare go down regularly. Relax.
- fwip 1y agoSure - but when AWS goes down, Amazon fixes it, even on the weekends. If you self-host, you need to pay a person to be on call to fix it.
- CursedSilicon 1y agoAWS doesn't have to pay people (LOTS OF PEOPLE) to keep things running over the weekends? And they aren't...just passing those costs on to their customers?
- fwip 1y agoThey are of course, but it's amortized over many users. If you're a small company, it's hard to hire one-tenth of an SRE.
- rypskar 1y agoNot only that. When your self-host goes down your customers complain that you are down. When AWS goes down your customers complain that internet is down
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- grim_io 1y ago
- exe34 1y agoexcept you now have your developers chasing their own tails figuring out how to insert the square peg in the round hole without bankrupting the company. cloud didn't save time, it just replaced the wheels for the hamsters.
- Ekaros 1y agoWouldn't you want someone watching over cloud infra at those times too? So maybe slightly less, but still need some people being ready.
- spatley 1y agoExactly, for the narrowly defined condition of running k8s on digital ocean with a managed control plane compared to Hetzner bare metal: AWS and DigitalOcean = $559.36 monthly or Hetzner = $132.96 The cost of an engineer to set up and maintain a bare metal k8s cluster is going to far exceed the roughly $400 monthly savings. If you run things yourself and can invest sweat equity, this makes some sense. But for any company with a payroll this does not math out.
- pdimitar 1y agoThat argument is compelling only at a first glance IMO. If you take a look at it another way then: 1. The self-hosting sweat and nerves are spent only once, 80% of them anyway (you still have to maintain every now and then e.g. upgrade). 2. The cloud setup will require babysitting as well and as such the argument that you only pay someone salary when self-hosting does not hold water. Ultimately it's a tradeoff between (a) the short- or long-term thinking of leadership, (b) in-house expertise and (c) how much money are you willing to throw at the problem for the promised shorter timelines -- and that one is assuming you'll find high-quality cloud hosting engineers which, believe me, is far from a given.
- icedchai 1y agoRight, because cloud providers take care of it all. /s Cloud engineers are more expensive than traditional sysadmins.