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And how many extra 'DevOps' people has the company now had to employ to manage these physical servers, and what is their annual salary? This never seems to be f

And how many extra 'DevOps' people has the company now had to employ to manage these physical servers, and what is their annual salary? This never seems to be factored into the calculations.

beat 13y ago
That was my first thought, too. Physical hardware == more staff. Also consider the risk management of keeping your security up to date, and the opportunity costs of making it easy to use for developers. Spend some time in old-school enterprise, and you'll see just how much pain and grief can happen. Remember, Amazon built its cloud not for the public, but for itself! The cloud gave them a clean separation of duties and cost management between application development and operations. That sort of thing can save large amounts of money and bureaucratic headache. They started selling AWS to the public only after they had a stable system that could produce excess capacity, which could then be resold.
- purple_horse 13y ago
  With modern tools like Fully Automatic Install and Ansible/Puppet it shouldn't be any more than for a Cloud service.
  - beat 13y ago
    But once you have a legacy system, getting the modern tools in there can be a real pain. Instant snowflake, just add expensive and archaic enterprise middleware.
    - purple_horse 13y ago
      True, but the article is talking about a startup building from scratch.
- simonebrunozzi 13y ago
  The "excess capacity" is a pure myth. When AWS started, it was using a set of Data Centers which had nothing to do with Amazon.com (the Retail part of it). Now Amazon.com is just another (big) customer of AWS. Disclaimer: I work for AWS.
echohack 13y ago
This this this. And what is the turnaround time on getting new servers provisioned for development? Are they using Docker, or are they stuck in Windows land where there's no open source private PaaS solution that makes any sense? How many of those servers have virtual machines provisioned and then those virtual machines sit idle? How long until the cruft virtual machines are so populous that they take up an ever increasing amount of your internal infrastucture and it's a nightmare to manage?
- waxzce 13y ago
  You can also use public PaaS
thezilch 13y ago
One? Your colo probably also will rent you help to rack, wire, and anything else physical. How many days do you expect to be "downtown?" Apart from the physical / racking aspect, it's not like your Ops has any less work to do with respect to clouds. You still have to manage your own software services, security, etc on either platform. You could triple your provisions with the savings of not being on the cloud, so it's hard to believe you won't see the train coming, if the concern is having to rack more than 20-60 servers a day. Arguably, that would be a good problem to have!

And how many extra 'DevOps' people has the company now had to employ to manage these physical servers, and what is their annual salary? This never seems to be factored into the calculations.

beat 13y ago

That was my first thought, too. Physical hardware == more staff. Also consider the risk management of keeping your security up to date, and the opportunity costs of making it easy to use for developers. Spend some time in old-school enterprise, and you'll see just how much pain and grief can happen. Remember, Amazon built its cloud not for the public, but for itself! The cloud gave them a clean separation of duties and cost management between application development and operations. That sort of thing can save large amounts of money and bureaucratic headache. They started selling AWS to the public only after they had a stable system that could produce excess capacity, which could then be resold.

purple_horse 13y ago
With modern tools like Fully Automatic Install and Ansible/Puppet it shouldn't be any more than for a Cloud service.
- beat 13y ago
  But once you have a legacy system, getting the modern tools in there can be a real pain. Instant snowflake, just add expensive and archaic enterprise middleware.
  - purple_horse 13y ago
    True, but the article is talking about a startup building from scratch.
simonebrunozzi 13y ago
The "excess capacity" is a pure myth. When AWS started, it was using a set of Data Centers which had nothing to do with Amazon.com (the Retail part of it). Now Amazon.com is just another (big) customer of AWS. Disclaimer: I work for AWS.

echohack 13y ago

This this this. And what is the turnaround time on getting new servers provisioned for development? Are they using Docker, or are they stuck in Windows land where there's no open source private PaaS solution that makes any sense? How many of those servers have virtual machines provisioned and then those virtual machines sit idle? How long until the cruft virtual machines are so populous that they take up an ever increasing amount of your internal infrastucture and it's a nightmare to manage?

waxzce 13y ago
You can also use public PaaS

thezilch 13y ago

One? Your colo probably also will rent you help to rack, wire, and anything else physical. How many days do you expect to be "downtown?" Apart from the physical / racking aspect, it's not like your Ops has any less work to do with respect to clouds. You still have to manage your own software services, security, etc on either platform. You could triple your provisions with the savings of not being on the cloud, so it's hard to believe you won't see the train coming, if the concern is having to rack more than 20-60 servers a day. Arguably, that would be a good problem to have!