[pdimitar]

That's true as well. It all depends on how much is the employer willing to invest in their employees in the end; if they foster longer-lasting relationships then many interesting internal projects become feasible or even desirable.

[ghaff]

Those invested-in employees will probably still leave, especially if they're very good and you can't match big tech salaries. And, in any case, you need redundancies for when they're on vacation, out sick, etc. Not to say you shouldn't develop in house competencies but you should do so deliberately because there are probably a lot more costs and risks than are obvious.

[pdimitar]

We're not blind to the tradeoffs. It's a long process to both change culture and nurture the necessary skills in your staff, AND take care of having human redundancy.

My point never was to idolize on-prem; I have agreed in other comments that from one point and on the cloud absolutely wins.

I'm mostly pointing out that there is a lot you can do before bowing your head to Amazon and accept $30_000+ monthly bill for infrastructure that I can fit in my 1 square meter food closet and which would likely cost me (or a few other experienced backenders) 2-3 weekends to setup.

[ghaff]

Absolutely. I'm definitely not in the "You're crazy if you don't just use AWS/GCP/Azure" camp. I'm just also not in the "See how cheap it is to just stick a system under my desk" camp. Totally dependent on use case and circumstances.

[pdimitar]

True. It's not a religion or a credo. We're simply evaluating our options because our cloud bill is way too high for what we do.

Time will tell but IMO it's super important to reserve the right to take a deeper look if you don't like your costs.

We're not as helpless as big tech wants us to believe.

[ghaff]

And figuring out those costs can be really hard. People like Corey Quinn have built a whole business out of helping people make sense of their AWS bills.

[pdimitar]

Yep, but it's all self-interest. At one point you ask yourself: must I really go down this rabbit hole?

[sobkas]

>I can fit in my 1 square meter food closet and which would likely cost me (or a few other experienced backenders) 2-3 weekends to setup.

I don't think that setting it up is main problem here. Keeping it up to date and secure is the hard part.