[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.