[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?