[dijit]

Sysadmins are cheaper than many people seem to think.

I had a person I trust a lot telling me that "if we go with a bare metal provider like GCore we'd have to hire someone", his reason for bringing that up was that the cost difference would be justified by not having to hire someone,.

However a GCore €400,000k/y bill becomes a €6,000,000~ if you were to use a public cloud, even with the scaling up and down when not in use (we are an extreme case of needing a lot of dumb unreliable compute thats geographically distributed).

I can hire a lot of sysadmins for that money, but I probably don't even need one because public clouds also need devops staff to manage the complexity anyway.

[DylanDmitri]

The risk is hiring a team of ineffective sysadmins, especially if your organization can’t assess sysadmin competence.

[dijit]

That would indeed be a risk, but the circular logic of this means no new company could ever have any competence outside of its founders. Which feels shortsighted.

Anyway, I am a former sysadmin. I am confident that I can identify competence in the requisite areas.

[criley2]

Governments tend to be far less competent at determining technical competence. Due to a wide variety of factors, governments tend to be completely uncompetitive in salary for technical positions meaning they're already hiring from the lower end of the pool (not including a few altruistic folks willing to forgo their market value).

At a company if a department isn't working out you just restructure and move on, but in the government, that team is going to retire in your org and collect pension from you, and there's very little you can do about that.

[dijit]

Everything you said seems to also apply for developers and the staff that would manage cloud resources.

Lack of cost control or effective use of a cloud provider leads to spiralling uncontrollable costs.

[rcxdude]

yeah, every company I know of that uses cloud has a team responsible for managing it anyway, and they don't seem much smaller than the team needed to manage on-prem. I don't really think this 'savings' exists in most cases.