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> Every company out there is using the cloud and yet still employs infrastructure engineers Every company beyond a particular size surely? For many small and m

by molf 10mo ago

> Every company out there is using the cloud and yet still employs infrastructure engineers Every company beyond a particular size surely? For many small and medium sized companies hiring an infrastructure team makes just as little sense as hiring kitchen staff to make lunch.

spwa4 10mo ago
For small companies things like vercel, supabase, firebase, ... wipe the floor with Amazon RDS. For medium sized companies you need "devops engineers". And in all honesty, more than you'd need sysadmins for the same deployment. For large companies, they split up AWS responsibilities into entire departments of teams (for example, all clouds have math auth so damn difficult most large companies have -not 1- but multiple departments just dealing with authorization, before you so much as start your first app)
add-sub-mul-div 10mo ago
You're paying people to do the role either way, if it's not dedicated staff then it's taking time away from your application developers so they can play the role of underqualified architects, sysadmins, security engineers.
- scott_w 10mo ago
  From experience (because I used to do this), it’s a lot less time than a self-hosted solution, once you’re factoring in the multiple services that need to be maintained.
  - pinkgolem 10mo ago
    As someone who has done both.. i disagree, i find self hosting to a degree much easier and much less complex Local reproducibility is easier, and performance is often much better
    - scott_w 10mo ago
      It depends entirely on your use case. If all you need is a DB and Python/PHP/Node server behind Nginx then you can get away with that for a long time. Once you throw in a task runner, emails, queue systems, blob storage, user-uploaded content, etc. you can start running beyond your own ability or time to fix the inevitable problems. As I pointed out above, you may be better served mixing and matching so you spend your time on the critical aspects but offload those other tasks to someone else. Of course, I’m not sitting at your computer so I can’t tell you what’s right for you.
      - pinkgolem 10mo ago
        I mean, fair, we are ofc offloading some of that.. email being one of those, LLM`s being another thing. Task runner/que at least for us postgres works for both cases. We also self host an s3 storage and allow useruploaded content in within strict borders.
- flomo 10mo ago
  Yeah, and nobody is looking at the other side of this. There just are not a lot of good DBA/sysop type who even want to work for some non-tech SMB. So this either gets outsourced to the cloud, or some junior dev or desktop support guy hacks it together. And then who knows if the backups are even working. Fact is a lot of these companies are on the cloud because their internal IT was a total fail.
  - Nextgrid 10mo ago
    If they just paid half of the markup they currently pay for the cloud I'm sure they'll be swimming in qualified candidates.
    - flomo 10mo ago
      For companies not heavily into tech, lots of this stuff is not that expensive. Again, how many DBAs are even looking for a 3 hr/month sidegig?
    - strken 10mo ago
      Our AWS spend is something like $160/month. Want to come build bare metal database infrastructure for us for $3/day?
      - Nextgrid 10mo ago
        When you need to scale up and don't want that $160 to increase 10x to handle the additional load the numbers start making more sense: 3 month's worth of the projected increase upfront is around 4.3k, which is good money for a few days' work for the setup/migration and remains a good deal for you since you break even after 3 months and keep on pocketing the savings indefinitely from that point on. Of course, my comment wasn't aimed at those who successfully keep their cloud bill in the low 3-figures, but the majority of companies with a 5-figure bill and multiple "infrastructure" people on payroll futzing around with YAML files. Even half the achieved savings should be enough incentive for those guys to learn something new.
        10mo ago
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barnabee 10mo ago
It depends very much what the company is doing. At my last two places it very quickly got to the point where the technical complexity of deployments, managing environments, dealing with large piles of data, etc. meant that we needed to hire someone to deal with it all. They actually preferred managing VMs and self hosting in many cases (we kept the cloud web hosting for features like deploy previews, but that’s about it) to dealing with proprietary cloud tooling and APIs. Saved a ton of money, too. On the other hand, the place before that was simple enough to build and deploy using cloud solutions without hiring someone dedicated (up to at least some pretty substantial scale that we didn’t hit).

by molf 10mo ago

spwa4 10mo ago

For small companies things like vercel, supabase, firebase, ... wipe the floor with Amazon RDS. For medium sized companies you need "devops engineers". And in all honesty, more than you'd need sysadmins for the same deployment. For large companies, they split up AWS responsibilities into entire departments of teams (for example, all clouds have math auth so damn difficult most large companies have -not 1- but multiple departments just dealing with authorization, before you so much as start your first app)

add-sub-mul-div 10mo ago

You're paying people to do the role either way, if it's not dedicated staff then it's taking time away from your application developers so they can play the role of underqualified architects, sysadmins, security engineers.

scott_w 10mo ago
From experience (because I used to do this), it’s a lot less time than a self-hosted solution, once you’re factoring in the multiple services that need to be maintained.
- pinkgolem 10mo ago
  As someone who has done both.. i disagree, i find self hosting to a degree much easier and much less complex Local reproducibility is easier, and performance is often much better
  - scott_w 10mo ago
    It depends entirely on your use case. If all you need is a DB and Python/PHP/Node server behind Nginx then you can get away with that for a long time. Once you throw in a task runner, emails, queue systems, blob storage, user-uploaded content, etc. you can start running beyond your own ability or time to fix the inevitable problems. As I pointed out above, you may be better served mixing and matching so you spend your time on the critical aspects but offload those other tasks to someone else. Of course, I’m not sitting at your computer so I can’t tell you what’s right for you.
    - pinkgolem 10mo ago
      I mean, fair, we are ofc offloading some of that.. email being one of those, LLM`s being another thing. Task runner/que at least for us postgres works for both cases. We also self host an s3 storage and allow useruploaded content in within strict borders.
flomo 10mo ago
Yeah, and nobody is looking at the other side of this. There just are not a lot of good DBA/sysop type who even want to work for some non-tech SMB. So this either gets outsourced to the cloud, or some junior dev or desktop support guy hacks it together. And then who knows if the backups are even working. Fact is a lot of these companies are on the cloud because their internal IT was a total fail.
- Nextgrid 10mo ago
  If they just paid half of the markup they currently pay for the cloud I'm sure they'll be swimming in qualified candidates.
  - flomo 10mo ago
    For companies not heavily into tech, lots of this stuff is not that expensive. Again, how many DBAs are even looking for a 3 hr/month sidegig?
  - strken 10mo ago
    Our AWS spend is something like $160/month. Want to come build bare metal database infrastructure for us for $3/day?
    - Nextgrid 10mo ago
      When you need to scale up and don't want that $160 to increase 10x to handle the additional load the numbers start making more sense: 3 month's worth of the projected increase upfront is around 4.3k, which is good money for a few days' work for the setup/migration and remains a good deal for you since you break even after 3 months and keep on pocketing the savings indefinitely from that point on. Of course, my comment wasn't aimed at those who successfully keep their cloud bill in the low 3-figures, but the majority of companies with a 5-figure bill and multiple "infrastructure" people on payroll futzing around with YAML files. Even half the achieved savings should be enough incentive for those guys to learn something new.
      - 10mo ago

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deleted 10mo ago

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barnabee 10mo ago

It depends very much what the company is doing. At my last two places it very quickly got to the point where the technical complexity of deployments, managing environments, dealing with large piles of data, etc. meant that we needed to hire someone to deal with it all. They actually preferred managing VMs and self hosting in many cases (we kept the cloud web hosting for features like deploy previews, but that’s about it) to dealing with proprietary cloud tooling and APIs. Saved a ton of money, too. On the other hand, the place before that was simple enough to build and deploy using cloud solutions without hiring someone dedicated (up to at least some pretty substantial scale that we didn’t hit).