> So what? I would rather have Google/Amazon employees on the issue than some random DevOps dude.
This is fine if three nines of availability is all you need. Doesn't matter much if you prefer a big brand employee fixing things or a small brand employee. It doesn't change the outcome.
However there are a lot of things that simply cannot live with crappy three nines availability. And the only way to do better is to stop relying on any single cloud, which inevitably requires infrastructure engineers aka random devops dudes.
In fairness one "random DevOps dude" might be equally capable and less expensive for your infrastructure. Generally speaking any software company can succeed without a cloud provider's infrastructure, it's just a matter of cost and developing that competency in-house. There are many site reliability engineers who specialize in high availability and downtime resolution on baremetal hardware. StackExchange notably has this competency internally.
Site reliability is a new fancy name for the sucker who is on call.
They will change career after being forced to work on week ends and holidays a few times. Incidentally, today is a Sunday AND the most taken holiday of the year.
I wouldn’t. Hire the right person and you have immediate response instead of waiting or somebody else. A large reason we are not going cloud for our new infrastructure.
At work we have a 24/7 20min response time clause. If the phone for work emergency calls we are ready to help in 20 minutes at any time around the clock even on Sunday.
Why would you do anything else for your sysop/sysadmin?
You surely realize that no human being can be available 24/7 within 20 minutes. It's beyond slavery to expect that from any employee.
You need at least 10 sysop/sysadmin to achieve anything close to that SLA, with a sustainable rota. Contrary to the parent posters who believe it can be done with THE right guy.
With 3 people you can have a "follow the sun" rotation during business hours which takes care of the entire week, and I don't think you would need 7 more people for the weekend.
This just doesn’t make sense. Google/Amazon employees basically are some random DevOps “dudes”. Whereas your own people would be...whoever you decided to hire to work on your infrastructure.
Problem being that Infrastructure is made to be very, very compicated because they're selling tons of managed features that have reliance upon each other. I don't know why this idea of having your own devops is suddenly now bad. renting your own bare hardware and managing solutions yourself is still very much a thing and something you have to do if you're using lots of bandwidth. Dropbox for example made their own infrastructure to get off of AWS [1].
I don't think that anyone thinks having your own infrastructure is bad, or if they do, they likely don't have much experience. Rather, I think it can be a nightmare if it's not properly managed, and it's hard to develop the skill to properly manage the process unless you've been burned in the past.
It's like an insurance. You wouldn't be able to hire as many and as highly paid random DevOps on your own. So you and others pay a 3th person to do it, just in case you need a competent person.