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by vlunkr 1191 days ago
“Just not for the hardware issues” is a huge deal though. That’s an entire skillset you can eliminate from your requirements if you’re only in the cloud. Depending on the scale of your team this might be a massive amount of savings.
3 comments
jrockway 1191 days ago
At my last job, I would have happily gone into the office at 3am to swap a hard drive if it meant I didn't have to pay my AWS bill anymore. Computers are cheap. Backups are annoying, but you have to do them in the cloud too. (Deleting your Cloud SQL instance accidentally deletes all the automatic backups; so you have to roll your own if you care at all. Things like that; cloud providers remove some annoyance, and then add their own. If you operate software in production, you have to tolerate annoyance!)

Self-managed Kubernetes is no picnic, but nothing operational is ever a picnic. If it's not debugging a weird networking issue with tcpdump while sitting on the datacenter floor, it's begging your account rep for an update on your ticket twice a day for 3 weeks. Pick your poison.

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Aeolun 1191 days ago
> At my last job, I would have happily gone into the office at 3am to swap a hard drive if it meant I didn't have to pay my AWS bill anymore

This seems foreign to many people, but I’d happily take on this responsibility if I get the attendant benefits.

Also incentivices me to make things robust enough I never have to.

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josho 1191 days ago
The flip side is there is an entirely new skillset required to successfully leverage the cloud.

I suspect those cloud skills are also higher demand and therefore more expensive than hiring for people to handle hardware issues.

Personally, I appreciate the contrarian view because I think many businesses have been naive in their decision to move some of their workloads into the cloud. I'd like to see a broader industry study that shows what benefits are actually realized in the cloud.

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ilyt 1191 days ago
Right. The skillset to pull the right drive from the server and put replacement one.

Says that you know nothing at all about actually running hardware as the bigger problem is by far "the DC might be drive 1-5 hour away" or "we have no spare parts at hand", not "fiddling with server is super hard"

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