[bdamm]

As a professional that came from software engineering let me tell you... that plugging in one machine is easy.

Plugging in 150 machines is significantly more challenging. Providing disaster response, backups, stable power, and VLANs to secure services, quickly ratchets up the cost. And nobody wants to pay one engineer per machine to babysit one machine, x 150. That wouldn't even be a good idea, because engineers get bored and start mucking with stuff that needs to be left alone.

Data center administration is a first class professional grouping. Software engineers who don't know that are a real hazard to any business.

[cookiecaper]

First, most of the time it's not a question of paying someone to run an entire data center, but rather some racks in someone else's data center. The data center has data center staff who handle a lot of this. It's unfair to pretend that going bare metal entails starting with an empty plot of land and building/managing a whole data center. While that may be the case for the largest companies, even moderately-sized companies won't do that.

When you're a business, you have to pay people to handle hardware no matter what. The question is not whether you need to pay someone to administer the hardware -- the question is who you are going to pay. It can be an employee, contractor, or third-party service company like AWS or remote hands at a colo.

I've seen multiple companies move to cloud merely because they were annoyed at having to go down to the rack to deal with hardware, often making oblique justifications about difficulty when they really meant that they don't like driving down to the colocation center.

Those companies have spent millions more paying AWS than they would've if they just hired a couple of hardware jockeys.

The argument basically becomes a question of whether you know how to hire someone who knows how to deal with hardware. If you don't, it's better to go with Amazon even though they're going to rake you over the coals cost-wise. If you do, then practically speaking, the differences should be small. Your hardware people will automatically fix the hardware issues just like Amazon's hardware people.

The bulk of the work of running servers is at the OS admin level, which is still the customer's responsibility with cloud servers. These arguments about difficulty of administration would work for something like Heroku, but they don't work for Amazon.

[omgdresser]

I was about to make a comment similar to this, but this is articulated so much better than what I was able to get out.

I'm in agreement, after the hardware deploy, you're pretty much left with what you would have in a cloud environment: a bunch of VMs (or in this case OS instances) that need care and feeding, and only rarely, much rarely than many would think, do you have to replace a disk, or recable because requirements changed.

[user5994461]

> As a professional that came from software engineering let me tell you... that plugging in one machine is easy.

Till you're the guy in your 20 people startup who has to do it and crawl around the racks with 100kg of equipment to assemble, cable and power up everything.