[dijit]

I guess people really have forgotten how to run datacenters.

The only people who should be shocked in this thread are the people who have been hoodwinked into thinking operations is so hard you need thousands of staff. I know AWS/GCP/Azure like to charge us as if we were hiring an army of sysadmins, but the truth is that day-to-day DC ops does not require so many people. Hardware failures are more rare than you think and you can work around them without panicking anyway.

[siva7]

You actually need thousands of people for operations at major cloud provider scale (and much more for development), but it scales at some point where you only need people for hands-on tasks at satellite plants and the rest sits at HQ.

[wkat4242]

Or rather at low wage locations like India :)

[benterix]

The management's way of thinking is: "Well, let's just pay for the peace of mind." Except that this famous peace of mind never comes, because the cloud gets more and more complex each year and it's hard to keep up. Heck, even Amazon can't keep up: for example, officially they depreciate bucket policies but internally they are using it for example in the Cloud Formation templates for the Control Tower. But now it's too late to go back as most of the internet is running on the three major public clouds. You need a lot of determination and a good plan to free oneself from vendor lock-in. In larger orgs it's practically impossible.

[adambatkin]

I don't believe that S3 Bucket Policies are deprecated. They are powerful, effective, and consistent with almost everything else at AWS (Resource Policy). Perhaps you are thinking of ACLs?

[benterix]

Sorry, yes, I meant ACLs!

[wkat4242]

This peace of mind is also outsourcing responsibility. Having someone else to point to when shit hits the fan is very valuable for a manager.

In this case they can't even get blamed for their vendor choice because both AWS and Azure are now so big that they're in "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" territory.

[fsociety]

Even within a single AWS region you can land in completely different data centers. Perhaps it doesn’t require as many people as some think, but the large cloud businesses run at a larger scale than your mom-and-pop data center.

[paulddraper]

But what about the hundreds of local jobs they promise?

[wkat4242]

They're temporary initial construction jobs and a few low skilled remote hands running around.

[Ekaros]

I wouldn't call those low skilled. But not developer paid.