[re-thc]

> And guess how long it takes me to set up an entire data center with Terraform on any of the three major cloud providers? (disclaimer: I work for one of them)?

And the discussion is how much extra do you pay for it.

> Hint: we didn’t, everything just scaled by itself.

Again it's not free so what's the surprise? Are you surprised that you get water out of your tap? Hint: it just flows!

> I compare that to the old days when it took us weeks to provision an MySQL server.

Sounds like you've burnt in the past is all. So your on-prem is slow does not equal all on-prem is bad?

> Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage

How do you know it doesn't? You've only looked at it from your use case and based on it making you happy and saving you time. Nothing to do with the business needs at all.

[scarface_74]

> How do you know it doesn't? You've only looked at it from your use case

So you didn’t see the rest of the paragraph that you snipped?

“unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.”

> So your on-prem is slow does not equal all on-prem is bad?

How fast can you spin up a dozen VMs? A message bus? A scalable database with read replicas? An entire redundant data center in another region? A few terabytes of storage? A redis cluster? An ElasticSearch cluster? A CDN? A few load balancers? The procurement process to get an extra server provision in a colo will by definition be slower than my deploying a CloudFormation stack.

[CogitoCogito]

> How fast can you spin up a dozen VMs? A message bus? A scalable database with read replicas? An entire redundant data center in another region? A few terabytes of storage? A redis cluster? An ElasticSearch cluster? A CDN? A few load balancers? The procurement process to get an extra server provision in a colo will by definition be slower than my deploying a CloudFormation stack.

Your examples here are just examples of situations where you basically need a cloud solution by definition. If these are your requirements, then yes obviously you should use cloud for it. That said, your points are a bit confusing. It's not an either-or. For situations like you're describing, you use cloud. For situations where you don't need to use cloud, you can consider something else like on-prem or colo or ...

You seem to have a (literally) extremist position where it's all cloud or nothing. It's not.

[scarface_74]

> For situations where you don't need to use cloud, you can consider something else like on-prem or colo or ...

I literally just gave examples where a colo or on prem makes complete sense - anytime that managing infrastructure is a competitive advantage.

If you have a static workload and your company has the competencies to manage infrastructure, go for on prem.

I’m the last person to recommend someone move to any cloud provider just to treat it like a colo.

[CogitoCogito]

Well then I'm a little confused. You wrote this earlier which contradicted my post:

> Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.

You don't need to be a company "where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise" in order for managing your own infrastructure to be a competitive advantage. Managing (some of) your own infrastructure can be a competitive advantage even managing infrastructure is not your core competency or even your goal. It is a competitive advantage of the TOC is lower. It sometimes is.

But if you're now saying you agree with my statement, then I guess well we're in agreement.

[magikstm]

Without a cloud it would take longer.

But, really how often do you need to do that and what % of users really need to?

Also, once on the cloud some business management take so long to "approve" new expenses that in reality it may not really be feasible to do things fast enough for it to be a benefit.

I've quite often seen the need for 5-10 meetings or 2-3 written documents to get approval for 10 new VMs for developers or new servers for backups.

[scarface_74]

> But, really how often do you need to do that and what % of users really need to?

When testing something or you want to spin up your own isolated environment for yourself or for your team? Very often.

> Also, once on the cloud some business management take so long to "approve" new expenses that in reality it may not really be feasible to do things fast enough for it to be a benefit.

And that’s get back to my other point that when you do a “lift and shift”. If you don’t change your processes both IT and technical, you won’t see any benefit from the cloud and you will end up spending more.

There are so many ways that you can both give developers freedom and still have the necessary guardrails. I’m speaking about AWS because that’s the one I know best (and where I work). But I’m sure there are equivalent services on other providers.

For instance you can have a vending machine type of setup where you allow department heads to set up non prod accounts with organization controlled service control policies. You can use a Service Catalog approach where you surface Terraform or CloudFormation defined products where the users can only provision infrastructure defined by their administrators. But they can do it themselves.

Depending on which level of the organization I’m working with, I try to convince the IT department to give individual departments their own organizational unit to monitor and to embed someone from IT into their team - ie a “DevOps” philosophy.