I mean I'm also proponent of "doing it right" most of the time, but throwing hardware at the problem is mighty fine solution in sub-TB areas
> 10 SSDs: will require rack space, electricity, PCIe slots, timely replacement, management software... most of these expenses will be recurring expenses. If done once, sometimes the existing infrastructure can amortize these expenses (i.e. you might have already had empty space in a rack, you might have already had spare PCIe slots, etc.), but amortization will only work in small numbers.
10NVMe SSDs fit into 1U.
The cloud always comes out terrible on hardware. The cloud is not selling hardware, it's terrible to buy any hardware in cloud, it sells spike capacity, and it sells software running on it.
There are many services in cloud that would be a lot of work to create (even if you need just small part of functionality) on-site but if you don't use it and just need to throw raw hardware at the problem consistently, a rack with hardware will be far cheaper solution even after incurring the engineering cost to deploy and automate it.
We have 7 racks and time to manage hardware is some minuscule fraction, and time to manage automation on it is still small part of our time, and we're just ops team of 3.
> 10 SSDs: will require rack space, electricity, PCIe slots, timely replacement, management software... most of these expenses will be recurring expenses. If done once, sometimes the existing infrastructure can amortize these expenses (i.e. you might have already had empty space in a rack, you might have already had spare PCIe slots, etc.), but amortization will only work in small numbers.
10NVMe SSDs fit into 1U.
The cloud always comes out terrible on hardware. The cloud is not selling hardware, it's terrible to buy any hardware in cloud, it sells spike capacity, and it sells software running on it.
There are many services in cloud that would be a lot of work to create (even if you need just small part of functionality) on-site but if you don't use it and just need to throw raw hardware at the problem consistently, a rack with hardware will be far cheaper solution even after incurring the engineering cost to deploy and automate it.
We have 7 racks and time to manage hardware is some minuscule fraction, and time to manage automation on it is still small part of our time, and we're just ops team of 3.