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by Karunamon 2283 days ago
Ok, so we replace a lot of opex with a little capex and a lot more opex. You only need devops types if your business runs on a cloud provider, now you need to employ facilities, sysadmins, security, etc. It's not just the cost of the hardware we're talking about, your labor budget will necessarily increase as well.
2 comments
falcolas 2283 days ago
On a tangent from the sibling comments (which are spot on), colocation does exist. They handle the network drops, power, security, cooling, and you just have to ship them servers. Before AWS, this is how most businesses ran (including Amazon).

Few businesses ever get to the point where they need to run their own datacenter. And when they do, the costs would be roughly even or lower to AWS due AWS' markup (for handling those DC-related things for you, plus profit).

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toomuchtodo 2283 days ago
Devops types are sysadmins that cost more for mostly the same skillset (you know cloud primitives, you know infra as code, you know some python/bash or powershell depending on the underlying OS). Facilities, security, etc are usually covered by your hardware hosting provider, or colocation provider. Still a lower cost than cloud. You are still paying similar labor costs regardless if you're in the cloud or have your own metal.

Disclaimer: Previously a devops/infra guy, before that ops/networking/sysadmin, built out colo facilities/datacenters/hosting companies before cloud. Have done a lot of cost models for storage and compute, still do on the side.

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Karunamon 2283 days ago
So who takes care of the non-development tasks that AWS (or any cloud provider, really) is handling on the backend? Schlepping the hardware around, swapping failing drives, hardware monitoring, actually speccing out and running a datacenter, physical security, and so forth?

It's generally not the same people who are going to be at their computers running awscli (or if it is, now we get to figure in how much time they're spending on tasks that are not their primary job and how many extra of them we get to hire to maintain the same velocity, not to mention the occasional bit of firefighting you get to do when you manage your own infra)

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