> Much easier to spin up or down if you no longer need them.
It takes 5 minutes to set up a Docker Swarm Mode cluster. It takes maybe 15 minutes for k3s or microk8s. After that, auto-scaling is dead simple, and no MORE complex than some shitty vendor locked-in cloud solution.
> that needs to have both a fail-over node and backup solution
ZFS pool replication, Ceph, GlusterFS, etc. Lots of options here. These are long-solved problems.
> A disaster can be as simple as a failed disk
Right, which is why you design your on-prem cluster with N+2 redundancy in the first place, and with a locked cabinet with spare parts. Cattle not pets, and all that. Do you think your EBS storage never fails? You'd need to do exactly the same thing in the cloud, anyway.
> but spending 55k/yr for a sysadmin on-prem to maintain
First, if you're paying only 55k for sysadmins, you should be planning to fail anyway. Competence is compensated quite a bit north of there.
Second, assuming the context is small business, you're going to have role crossover anyway, it's inevitable - chances are that your developer(s) is(are) administering this. Not every business is Facebook.
It takes 5 minutes to set up a Docker Swarm Mode cluster. It takes maybe 15 minutes for k3s or microk8s. After that, auto-scaling is dead simple, and no MORE complex than some shitty vendor locked-in cloud solution.
> that needs to have both a fail-over node and backup solution
ZFS pool replication, Ceph, GlusterFS, etc. Lots of options here. These are long-solved problems.
> A disaster can be as simple as a failed disk
Right, which is why you design your on-prem cluster with N+2 redundancy in the first place, and with a locked cabinet with spare parts. Cattle not pets, and all that. Do you think your EBS storage never fails? You'd need to do exactly the same thing in the cloud, anyway.
> but spending 55k/yr for a sysadmin on-prem to maintain
First, if you're paying only 55k for sysadmins, you should be planning to fail anyway. Competence is compensated quite a bit north of there.
Second, assuming the context is small business, you're going to have role crossover anyway, it's inevitable - chances are that your developer(s) is(are) administering this. Not every business is Facebook.