[csydas]

I don't consider this rude or blunt, but rather incomplete as I really am not sure what points are frustrating for you or what you would hope someone takes away from it -- I'm an outside observer on the cloud subject as I have seen huge debates over use of the public cloud internally at my company and also with client companies.

I've seen the billing costs of the public cloud absolutely demolish an IT org's yearly budget in a month because of unexpected cost upticks, and I've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership by reducing needed licensing/staff/building costs. I get both sides on what the public cloud can do.

I've also seen what you can do on-premises; I've worked with clients who manage 7000+ machines (mostly virtual + some physical) with a team of 4 using pretty reasonably priced on-site hardware. (pro-tip, I guess Hitachi boxes are absurdly great servers with fantastic uptime, pockmarked only by an absolutely horrendous UI to manage)

My experience from the many clients I work with is that it is less about the specific stack you settle on and more your comfort level in getting the most efficiency out of it. The deeper and more intimate you are with all levels of your infrastructure, the better you know how to eke out the most from every single $.01 you spend on it.

[trabant00]

When I'm frustrated I'm not exactly clear in my writing.

You need to be able to do both options before having an opinion on which is appropriate in which case. I am suprised to have to state this. But in my experience people argue one option a lot without being to deliver the other.

People who know bare metal are rare these days from the total of available infrastructure engineers (call them sysadmins, devops, etc). I guess this justifies companies looking at cloud a little bit. But if you really search you can find engineers sub 100k per year being able to deliver 100k per month savings compared to AWS.

There are also engineers who stayed away from cloud and can't deliver that option. A lot more rare though. The same level of wrong if they argue against cloud from ignorance.

The right choice for serious infrastructures is always both these days. Have the bulk on premise for steady loads and 95% of features, expand to public clouds for dynamic scaling and features you don't want do do yourself, at least yet. This combination offers good costs, flexibility, covers possible future needs, etc

[southerntofu]

> People who know bare metal are rare these days from the total of available infrastructure engineers

Sysadmins are not rare they're just not the people you hear about in Silicon Valley bubble anymore. 90+% of businesses haven't moved to the "cloud" (i.e. whoever the fuck's computer you can't get your hands on in case of problems) and even if they wanted to it would make no sense: most businesses just need a basic website and an email/accounting service. Cloud abstractions provide much complexity and zero benefits for such usecases.

> But in my experience people argue one option a lot without being to deliver the other.

I'm in this box. I can't deliver "cloud" computing and from a political perspective i refuse to "learn". Also, it makes no sense for the non-profit projects i work with: the biggest ones need at most a few servers which is still manageable by hand and certainly easier to deal with via Ansible/Chef than via new layers of abstractions and all their new failure modes (eg k8s/AWS).

[realityking]

> most businesses just need a basic website and an email/accounting

I think those businesses should definitely go to the Cloud - but not IaaS. Use Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace for the email needs and a Website-as-a-service vendor, whether that’s wordpress.com or Webflow.

[southerntofu]

I'm not saying you're wrong, but why do you call that the cloud again? Mutualized hosting is what we've been doing since "forever".

The part where i disagree: don't go with Microsoft or Google, they're the worst. They've got less-than-stellar service, abysmal support, and they're capitalist assholes. Go with a local tech coop or non-profit (or even just a local tech artisan for-profit company) with friendly support.

I think it's been said in many other threads, but it's always worth repeating: by using Microsoft/Google email services, you make it impossible for others to use a solution of their choice because they will be blocked despite having perfect server configuration.

[csydas]

Thank you for sharing this, it helps clear up the concern you had a lot.

I deal with some big German clients fairly frequently and one of the requirements is "[they] own the entire stack top to bottom, back to front." A lot of dark site operations I work on also share a similar requirement, so really it's why I'm far more open and comfortable with an all on premises situation since I see the scaling done without any public cloud.

From what I do work with on public cloud sure, I absolutely get why it is so easy to scale if you don't already have a good team to build and orchestrate a local set up. I also see some big name companies I contract with just throw money onto a fire fueled by Azure, and while the expenditure hurts sure, it's still considered acceptable.

I guess I probed because I see a lot of different sides of modern architecture and aside from a well documented and disciplined one, I'm not sure there's a right thing with modern architecture, just different comfort zones with different efficiencies.

[Aeolun]

There are few things we want to do on-premise any more. The main problem of on-premise, and benefit of cloud, is that we can add new capacity at a moments notice. You never have to wonder if you’ll need to add more capacity (with two month lead times) to provision a database.

Now you could say that infra teams that do not anticipate such a need are less than ideal, and I’d agree with you, but I haven’t been part of them and I imagine they have their own issues to deal with.

Cloud (as a dev) makes me not worry about infra teams, since they’re not our problem (beyond the ones managing the cloud environment).

[headsoup]

There are certainly companies like yours that are perhaps Web product driven and need flexible scalability, but there are many out there that have little requirements for such scaling, at least unexpectedly, which will run perfectly fine with on-premises virtualisation.

The poster above is right, both have their purpose, but those sold on cloud as the complete solution are kidding themselves in most cases, Happy to accept crazy cloud cost blow-outs above over-provisioning tin or thinking properly about the use-cases.

It honestly sounds like you don't care about efficiency because of either good inflows or a need to move extremely fast. Such is the appeal of cloud...

[Aeolun]

You are actually right. Thinking back to other companies I’ve worked for, only the last two had any need for cloud, the others had a more or less stable workload that was ideal for on-premise. Also all between 5-200 employees, I wonder if that matters.

[kova12]

Sub 100k engineers are a fiction. Sure, you could get somebody on staff for under 100k salary, but it's not necessarily going to be someone competent.

But even aside from that: OK, you found somebody who agrees to work for 90k. What about social security tax? Group health coverage? Workman's comp insurance? HR support? Payroll? Risk of lawsuits if someone hurts them/their feelings?

[rmbyrro]

Thing is: many AWS customers have a sub-100k/mo bill. Savings from this sub-100k person will be relatively lower.

On top of that, for small/mid-sized companies, it's difficult to avoid "employee-lockin". It's perceived as a minor risk to have a vendor lock-in. Unfortunately, often they turn out to be right.