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by Nextgrid 1340 days ago
I don't see the point of public cloud. In practice, it still requires a sysadmin (now called "DevOps engineers") so it's not any better than rented bare-metal in terms of maintenance overhead, while still being extremely expensive.

Use a managed PaaS to begin with (you pay more but it does genuinely save you time as there is no management overhead), then when you're ready to do things yourself go straight to hosted bare-metal, and only use public cloud services for their managed services that you can't replicate yourself (think Redshift/Athena/Aurora/etc).
1 comments
tatersolid 1340 days ago
> so it's not any better than rented bare-metal in terms of maintenance overhead

In my experience the maintenance overhead of the cloud is much lower. My dayjob (B2B SaaS) spent about 75% of the infrastructure team’s time on things like patching switch firmware, balancing UPS loads, diagnosing flaky switch ports or transceivers, managing logging growth, etc. None of that made our products better from a customer perspective.

Since our cloud move those same infra staff support many more services and apps with much faster turnaround for product teams. And we traded upcoming multi-million capex investments in servers/switches/appliances into a monthly cloud bill that scales much more closely with revenue.

The public cloud is for businesses constrained by people; we simply could not afford to hire enough people to do the same stuff on-prem or in colo.

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Nextgrid 1339 days ago
> patching switch firmware, balancing UPS loads, diagnosing flaky switch ports or transceivers, managing logging growth

I've never had to worry about messing with switches/cabling/UPSes with my Hetzner or OVH servers.

I'm not sure why people always believe that bare-metal == self-managed colo. That's not the case and colo only really makes sense for very large companies who can actually save by buying & managing their own hardware or have specific requirements that dedicated server providers don't offer.

Log growth can be addressed by using a managed service (including AWS Cloudwatch if you really wanted to, but you'd have to be a masochist). Frankly, you'd have the same issue if you were on EC2.

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locutous 1339 days ago
Most of these stated problems just go away if you choose a co-location vs your previous on prem.

Whenever I price out cloud rentals, I consistently find that the fees will equal the cost of the machine in less than a year.

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