[candiddevmike]

> Spending serious engineering time to wrangle with the complexities of cloud orchestration is not something that should be taken lightly.

Bare metal and datacenter orchestration is leaps and bounds more complex. You're paying for the abstraction.

[latch]

If your scale is crazy, or your product doesn't allow you to use battle-tested pieces, then orchestration is complex in both cases.

In most cases, managing software on bare metal is more complex in exactly one case: when engineers only know cloud abstractions.

[skrtskrt]

after working at a cloud provider, I would say:

1. managing compute clusters has gotten a lot easier but managing storage clusters and running good storage products for block & object storage on them is very very very far from a solved problem and quite frankly it sucks and is not fun.

2. planning out buying, installing, upgrading, patching, and retiring hardware, server/hypervisor OSs, takes waaaaaaaaay more engineering management skill and experience than 99.9% of companies have. Plus you probably have to fight for every dollar of investment against a board / investors. Even at the cloud provider we were constantly getting kneecapped by upper management not wanting to spend money on hardware.

[rbranson]

Yeah calling the EC2 API is definitely more complex than leasing datacenter space, purchasing racks of hardware, deploying a fault tolerant and secure network, capturing and managing offsite backups, dealing with hardware component failures, etc.

[latch]

Serious question, are you familiar with dedicated hosting?

[trollbridge]

If you’re at that scale, there are plenty of other platforms that don’t have vendor lock in and overly complex, proprietary APIs by design.

[trollbridge]

It really isn’t. I use a combination of bare metal, VMs on those bare metal, and servers hosted at places like Digital Ocean.

Orchestration is dead simple and mostly automated using off the shelf, open source tools. If a server goes down, it’s a few minutes to replace it. The cloud based hosting is a fixed cost each month - no usage based surprises.

Meanwhile, for clients, spent huge amounts of time fixing broken Kubernetes setups and hit serious design constraints because of usage based pricing on their PaaS infrastructure like being unable to do complex queries from a database.

I wouldn’t think twice about the same query on our in house hosted DBs on $400 servers.

[michpoch]

> If a server goes down, it’s a few minutes to replace it.

Like you drive to the server rooms and have a stack of new servers, physically replace the old one with the new one and re-set everything in a few minutes? Or is your “bare metal” an ec2 instance?

[wongarsu]

If you run your own datacenter maybe. But if you pay to rent bare metal servers, orchestrating those isn't any more complex. The biggest downside is that depending on the provider you might have to wait hours instead of minutes when provisioning a new server