[tpxl]

We used to have on-prem redis and a devops engineer to manage it, then we moved to redis in the cloud and had a devops engineer to manage it.

Saying that in the cloud you don't need engineers to manage "operational support" is the biggest lie the cloud managed to sell.

[glogla]

If you just run redis on virtual server in cloud, you're not replacing the devops engineer who manages redis. You're replacing:

- the network engineers who manage switches, firewalls, routers, nats and connectivity

- the people who manage on-prem hardware, install new servers, replace failing servers, and switch broken disks for working ones and install base os using some ilom

- the whole process for ordering that hardware and getting it delivered on time - including knowing when it's going to be necessary

- if your on-prem had virtual servers, the people who manage and operate vmware

- if your on-prem had SAN, the people who manage and operate that SAN (and buy new disks and take care of capacity planning)

Some of those things you still have to do - for example configure firewall, or say "I want to take a snapshot of this virtual disk drive" but instead of doing a difficult technical thing, you can do it in web ui - but you still need to do what to do.

And of course, if you never had SAN and virtual servers and two data center with your team managing the interconnect between private networks, there's a lot of stuff that the Cloud could give you that you probably don't need.

Now if you move to managed redis, you're also replacing the person who installs and patches the linux the redis runs on, and the one who installs, backups and configures the redis. And you get the redis on button click, so if you suddenly need three more, you're also replacing the person who automates building redises.

You are right, that it is not that the operational support is just gone. Some of it is gone. Some of it is replace by doing cloud stuff (like thinking of buying reserved instances instead of actual physical servers). Some of it is just more efficient.

Now if any of this doesn't fit you're use case because you have too small or too large scale, then the Cloud is of course a bad idea.

[bird_monster]

You've just wrapped a very specific definition of "Operational support" into a very vague term.

From another post in this thread: If you want to deploy distributed stream processing like Apache Kafka, but do not want to roll it yourself, you can use a tool like AWS Kinesis or Azure Event Hubs.

You still need "Operational Support" to manage EH/Kinesis, but generally it's closer to the type of "Operational Support" that can be provided by a general backend software engineer, as opposed to a DevOps/Infrastructure-specific dev. By using a Cloud (Managed) service, you're removing the need to manage:

* Uptime management * Scaling * Custom-multi-AZ

And probably a lot more. Sure, you've still have to actually handle events appropriately, but you have to do that either way.