[swebs]

I wouldn't consider VPS providers part of "the cloud". You simply rent a (virtual) server. With AWS and the like, you pay for their automation of services. You don't need to manually deploy load balancing, CDNs, DDoS mitigation, security hardening, and the like. The big pitch is that you're paying a bit more in order to phase out your IT team.

[falcor84]

> The big pitch is that you're paying a bit more in order to phase out your IT team.

Really? I have to say I don't understand it. I remember the "NoOps" movement from a few years ago and I just find the whole concept around it to be almost hilarious; kind of like Salesforce's old "No Software" logo (which is nowhere to be found in their newer marketing).

As I see it, as long as your organization has people using IT in any capacity at all, you will need someone in charge of IT Operations. Whatever you may want to call it: DevOps, or SRE, or PE, or even if you just decide it's something that each of your regular devs is going to be doing, it's a function that needs to be done.

Someone needs to be able to set up the systems, monitor them, scale them, secure them, and troubleshoot issues. It doesn't matter how well-engineered and maintained and automated the components you rely on are, they will break in various compound fractures and you will need to deal with the downtime and potential corruption to your composite system.

I'll eat my hat if you can point me towards a single non-trivial software service that has been running continuously without any "IT".

[scarface74]

As I see it, as long as your organization has people using IT in any capacity at all, you will need someone in charge of IT Operations. Whatever you may want to call it: DevOps, or SRE, or PE, or even if you just decide it's something that each of your regular devs is going to be doing, it's a function that needs to be done.

That's true, but I don't need to worry about the server that my database, load balancer, queuing system, RedisCache, storage, etc. is running on. I only have to worry about my applications and the actual database. If I need to provision more hardware, it's a click of a button (well actually updating my CloudFormation template).

There is an entire level of both hardware and operating system maintenance that I don't have to worry about.

[warrenm]

>There is an entire level of both hardware and operating system maintenance that I don't have to worry about.

Right. So you traded [relatively] inexpensive OS and infrastructure maintainers for [relatively] expensive application and tier maintainers.

[drb91]

My interpretation of devops/noops is that it marks the lack of major distinction in hiring because both ops and development are seen as part of the same process, as opposed to simply pretending you don’t have infrastructure.

This is certainly part of the reasoning for things like terraform, cloudformation, even chef/puppet/ansible—people want a single process for development of reviewing and executing code.

[warrenm]

>the "NoOps" movement

I always pronounced that as "nnnn..oops"

[rpeden]

With DO and Linode adding things like block storage volumes, object storage, and load balancing, they're becoming more than just simple VPS providers.

They definitely don't offer anywhere near as many services as Google, MS, Amazon, or even Alibaba's cloud offerings. But they're becoming pretty decent 'cloud lite' providers who cover what's needed for plenty of folks and companies.

[warrenm]

And - at least DO - they've been offering these things for quite a while now, too

[warrenm]

>I wouldn't consider VPS providers part of "the cloud". You simply rent a (virtual) server. With AWS and the like, you pay for their automation of services.

Might want to go recheck the API documentation for providers like DO et al