[bob1029]

I've been asking this question for a long time, and I can't arrive at a solution in the middle that makes sense anymore.

If we pull the ripcord on AWS, we are going 100% on-prem with our own servers. Bare metal is just watered down EC2 as far as we are concerned. You still get left holding the bag on a plethora of management duties, so you might as well just take ownership of the whole stack at that point. There are actual benefits to keeping your own hardware in a datacenter that you can physically access. There are also a shitload of downsides that need to be reviewed. Once you accept and adjust to this fate, things can move a lot more smoothly than the cloud salespeople would like to admit.

Ultimately, you are probably stuck in the cloud until you can hit that point of being able to dedicate 2+ full-time engineers to the task of managing your infrastructure. Multiple hats for developers works for cloud, but not so much for on-prem. Having to drive to the datacenter should be something that only a few people in your organization need to worry about. You could consider outsourcing this specific aspect for a "pseudo-cloud" experience, but that is more complicated and starts to defeat the original purpose.

[theshrike79]

> Ultimately, you are probably stuck in the cloud until you can hit that point of being able to dedicate 2+ full-time engineers to the task of managing your infrastructure

This is the exact reason people stay on AWS. You need to be big and decently profitable to afford 2+ full time people managing the server hardware purchases, maintenance, updates - same with network.

These people need to be 24/7 on-call unless you can somehow make your system so fault-tolerant, that it can handle up to 16 hours of downtime without intervention (breaks the second the engineer clocks out, needs to hold its own until they clock back in).

Even the two people are a stretch when you need to be 24/7, that's at least 3 shifts and even then you're one flu away from being short-staffed again.

So now we're at a point where you need to make enough profit to pay 4 competent server engineer's salaries just to get out of AWS. Add to that the one-time costs of buying your own servers, setting them up and colocation costs.

That's a lot.

[bsder]

> Ultimately, you are probably stuck in the cloud until you can hit that point of being able to dedicate 2+ full-time engineers to the task of managing your infrastructure.

Um, exactly?

People think about cloud as outsourcing the hardware when you are actually outsourcing the system administration.

So, when you have generated those system administrators in house (you can't hire them anymore because system administration as a career path is dead due to the cloud vendors) because they are troubleshooting the "cloud" so much, it's time to pull some things back to on-prem.

The other time is when you have one particular characteristic (network, storage, etc.) that the cloud providers are killing you on and you will save a whopping amount of money by changing. However, by that time, you presumably are successful enough that you have generated those system administrators anyway.