[tatersolid]

It’s about staff and focus.

Right now we have 3 sysadmins for our own DC, and they can’t keep up with all the maintenance (upgrades on infra are the worst. Software quality on switches/SANs/appliances is terrifying. And those are better than quality of Server management, BIOS, etc. Even VMware has caused lots of pain with patches and upgrades in recent years.

If you don’t ever patch/upgrade to fix all the security vulnerabilities that exist at the infrastructure layer maybe “do it yourself” is cheaper. But that doesn’t fly in the banking industry.

We’re half-in the cloud and moving more there just to keep our head above water. We’re spending way less on cloud services than the $500K/year it would cost to double our infrastructure staff and keep it all in house.

[eldavido]

I've written a lot on this thread. I think the linchpin of this entire thing is how much salaries for technical people have lifted.

If you can get a qualified dev/dc engineer for 50 or 60K maybe you rack your own. But when facebook is paying all-in median wages of 240K/year things start to look different. I understand not everyone is going to be able to work at fb and not everyone lives in California. But when one of your critical inputs doubles or triples in price, of course that's going to adjust how things get done an in industry.