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by w8rbt 3075 days ago
This! A small dev team with an AWS account and a git repo will run circles around the IT team in terms of speed, compliance requirements and scalability. Traditional network infrastructure, virtualization, security, DBMS, etc. are all on the verge of extinction.
2 comments
shiftpgdn 3075 days ago
At 2-10x the cost of on prem systems, sure.

There are plenty of things AWS doesn't work for.

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user5994461 3075 days ago
At 1/10th or 1/20th of the on premises costs you mean.

AWS works better and cheaper for almost everything that involve more than a rack of hardware.

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shiftpgdn 3075 days ago
The other way around. The cost to use Amazon never works out once hit more than a handful of high workload systems. I write out the proposal for our C levels every quarter and the increased cost of going to Amazon is enough to hire 2 full time level 1 sysadmins.

Edit: This obviously is super variable. If you have a low load worldwide need AWS will win. Or rapid bursts of traffic. Or hundreds of other scenarios where it makes sense. It is not a one size fits all solution though.

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Spooky23 3075 days ago
It depends on how you measure and account for cost. My last big on premises project landed about $10M of hardware, which wasn’t at capacity for about 18 months for various reasons. And that was a very successful project.

Yet it wasted about $2-2.5M in hardware value alone. That’s not free, especially when you wouldn’t be incurring cost on a pay by drink cloud model.

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technion 3074 days ago
You said it yourself - "a dev team".

Now take, for example, a legal firm. One of the major LOB vendors in this space has a product that only runs on Oracle on Windows, with an extremely snowflake-like build. You can call them a dinosaur, but since they are a legal firm that wants to be competitive they will use this product.

Supporting this product involves a somewhat constant string of repairs, involving things like "logon to a user desktop and reregister DLLs". It takes a helpdesk team to run these things. The new "cloud" edition is literally a Microsoft RDS server that you run on premises, and on which you run the client software. Thereby facilitating remote access, making it a "cloud" product.

Do we argue that legal firms don't matter because soon every company will soon just be a development team? I don't think that's feasible.

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