[mbesto]

This doesn't take into account the following transactions:

- The time and money it takes to find said $30-50k engineer

- The risk (and therefore potential cost) if the engineer doesn't do the job correctly

- The unknown cost of "occasionally fixing" could be $50 or $50,000. Given how nebolus the DevOps position is, you also can't be sure the stuff this individual is doing is considered best practice.

- There is overhead time spent on managing such a resource (teleconferencing, IM's, etc)

- There is potential that the resource is unavailable and therefore a potential downtime that could cause your business loss

There's a reason Heroku exists and has been successful, and these are just a few of them.

[nickpsecurity]

The alternative doesn't take into account:

- The time and money it takes to find and evaluate providers like Heroku

- The risk (and therefore potential cost) if the SaaS solution doesn't handle your needs as advertised

- Unknown costs that crop up both in paying the provider and handling stuff outside the provider.

- Overhead spent managing cloud applications

- Potential that local Internet or cloud startup experiences downtime.

There's a reason dedicated IT people exist and have been successful, and these are just a few of them.

[cinquemb]

I like when people lay out all the obstacles people would face because I think the probability of creating an solution to this is > 0 and higher when people question models.

But this one i would like to ask some questions about:

"The unknown cost of "occasionally fixing" could be $50 or $50,000. Given how nebolus the DevOps position is, you also can't be sure the stuff this individual is doing is considered best practice."

Who gets to decide what's best practice? How does such information about such best practice propagate? How much does it cost to acquire such best practice knowledge? Is trying to mitigate for this all the time a theoretical constraint on all possible solutions (i.e. without trying to mitigate for this, things will not work at all) or for any of the issues you bring up that are probably valid assumptions for some set of solutions?