[tetha]

My company has done some research on that, in the webscale bubble. It is wrong to think of the divide as "Cloud" vs "Bare Metal" in a VM for server thing. Disregarding up-front investment, you're comparing rented VMs in the cloud with bare metal boxes, datacenter costs, and most important, manpower.

At a small scale, you're paying the cloud less than 2 or 3 competent admins with datacenter and networking experience cost for salary. In that situation, you're saving money, because you're saving the hardware ops team. You're paying more dollars per iop, core and GB of ram, but the alternate method of obtaining these resources has more surrounding costs than "ze cloud".

On the other hand, once you're shoveling several hundred kilo-dollars per month to a cloud provider, it makes sense to throw a million or 10 at dell and hire those operators, because it will save money within a year or two. This only makes sense if you need the resources, but if you need those resources, it helps being more efficient.

[drdaeman]

Cloud may save from hardware/driver issues - by providing an already tested environment, that doesn't (normally) trip on some weirdness in, say, network drivers.

But if the problem is in the software stack, one would still need competent sysadmins/system engineers with skills to diagnose and resolve the issue. When (just a random example) oom-killer wreaks havoc and free(1) insists there's more than half of physical memory still available, it doesn't matter whenever one's in the cloud or not.

I believe, skilled system engineers are still a requirement for any large project, be it in cloud or not.

[user5994461]

> I believe, skilled system engineers are still a requirement for any large project, be it in cloud or not.

And that's why cloud will win every single time, forever, on all metrics.

Because the cloud requires less engineers to achieve the same work, as it takes care of the low level hardware work.

[drdaeman]

How that's different from hosting provider engineers taking care of setting up a dedicated server and even pre-installing a tested OS image? They also usually handle all the hardware-related issues you may encounter.

That used to work well before the "cloud" era, and still does.

[tetha]

This is why I said hardware op.

If you use some VM-based cloud infrastructure you will still need a bunch of good system/linux admins to make your application work on the linux in the cloud. Without these, you're toast.

Bare metal requires you to have both good system and linux admins, and on top of that, good hardware admins, networks and datacenter hands. These are different skill sets.

So again: If you do the bare metal thing right at the scale it pays for itself, you'll probably end up paying both the skillset for the cloud deployment, and add the hardware skillset on top.

[drdaeman]

Are hardware sysadmins a different caste? Unless you you mean having own networking (like a router/ASA in addition to the server, or even your own private fiber), of course, and those CCNAs etc. Or those experts on some specialized hardware, like giant FC SANs or whatever one might fancy. If, when talking about "bare metal" we go to those extremities, then, sure, cloud is unbeatable.

I believe, usually, "bare metal" hosting means you order the hardware, get it installed, but networking/cooling/power supply/etc are done by the datacenter people, not your own staff (your own staff may be not even permitted to enter the server room). No less-common specialized hardware to deal with, either.

System engineers must known OS internals well. If they do, it's unlikely they can debug, say, a kernel memory leak (which can be a thing in a VM), but not a lockup in a network card driver's interrupt handler (which is close to impossible in a cloud VM, but I saw this on a bare metal). Maybe I'm wrong, but that would be, like, too specialized and just weird sort of specialization. Am I wrong?