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.
Every 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.
This. 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)
I 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.
The 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.
Exactly. 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.
Exactly, 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.
That 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.
Yeah 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.
> 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.
Ohh idk if this is the best comparison, due to just how much nuance bubbles up.
If you have to manage those devices, Windows and Active Directory and especially Group Policy works well. If you just have to use the devices, then it depends on what you do - for some dev work, Linux distros are the best, hands down. Often times, Windows will have the largest ecosystem and the widest software support (while also being a bit of a mess). In all of the time I’ve had my MacBook I really haven’t found what it excels at, aside from great build quality and battery life, it feels like one of those Linux distros that do things differently just for the sake of it, even the keyboard layout, the mouse acceleration feeling the most sluggish (Linux distros feel the best, Windows is okay) even if the trackpad is fine, as well as stuff like needing DiscreteScroll and Rectangle and some other stuff to make generic hardware feel okay (or even multi display work), maybe creative software is great there.
It’s the kind of comparison that derails itself in the mind of your average nerd.
But I get the point, the correct tool for the job and all that.
Sorry for off-topic but IMO MacBooks started losing value hard since the release of macOS Tahoe.
They were super fast, now part of them are sluggish.
As much as people hate to hear it, Apple is finished. They peaked and have nowhere to go. AI bubble is not going to last more than 1-3 years still, and Apple's inability to make a stable OS upgrade that doesn't ruin people's machines performance puts them in a corner.
Combine this with the fact that MS announced end of support for Windows 10 and both these corporations ironically start to make a strong case for Linux.
Is Linux desktop quite there? Maybe not fully but it's IMO pushing beyond 80% and people who don't like Windows and macOS anymore are starting to weigh their options.
"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
Honestly, 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.
What 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.
Not 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
I mean, yes, but also I get "3 nines" uptime by running a website on a box connected to my isp in my house. (it would easily be 4 or 5 nines if I also had a stable power grid...)
There's a lot, a lot of websites where downtime just... doesn't matter. Yes it adds up eventually but if you go to twitter and its down again you just come back later.
except 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.
