[nijave]

Do people want to use VMs? Imo they're much more annoying to manage than higher-level managed services. The last few places I've worked we spent our time trying to get rid of VMs and replace them with equivalent managed services.

Even with automation tools like Ansible or immutable server images, packing as Docker images and running on a container orchestrator have always been much easier.

[sgarland]

Depends if you want to pay more in money(a lot more) indefinitely, or pay more in time up front to set up automation. If you have immutable images, I don’t see how there is much difference at all. There are many container orchestrators available.

[nijave]

All these "VMs are sooo much cheaper" articles are always pricing bare VMs. It'd be more useful if someone actually calculated Total Cost of Ownership for a completed solution. You likely also need to price in load balancers, database servers, DNS, backups, access management, monitoring to get a fair quote and a meaningful comparison if you actually plan to run a real application

[sgarland]

> load balancers

These also run on VMs.

> database servers

These also run on VMs.

> DNS

This is such a tiny cost that it’s not worth mentioning at any scale.

> Backups

This can go any number of ways, with price tags all over the place, yes.

> Access management

There are plenty of free and paid solutions available.

> Monitoring

See Backups.

[nijave]

If we're only considering "runs on VMs" and "cost" then I can beat Hetzner by a huge margin running on the server in my home office. The point was, saying "it can run on a VM, who sells VMs the cheapest" is a largely useless comparison.

[rcarmo]

All your points skip over the need to hire people to do Ops on those VMs.

[nijave]

Not only that, some things like monitoring you get for free on cloud providers and setting up your own HA stack is going to be significantly more expensive.

There's almost no testing and validation needed for something like AWS RDS Postgres backups. Occasionally you store an instance and that's it.

Other things like Postgres out-of-disk-space is a 10 min fix on AWS to increment the assigned space. If your VM provider is offering SAN/NAS you may be in luck, otherwise hopefully you have a balast file or some logs you can delete to free enough space to get things running long enough to fix the problem.

[sgarland]

Setting up HA is approximately the same cost as with anything else: N x $cost. Web servers? Run two with HAProxy fronting them. Want HA HAproxy? Run two with a virtual IP. Etc. Not hard to calculate, not hard to set up. These are all extremely solved problems with tons of documentation available.

I mentioned monitoring being required and having a wide variety of options and price points.

If your DB runs out of space in a VM that’s on you for not having adequate monitoring and alerting. If you don’t have networked storage available and somehow fail to see the predicted eventual out of disk, again, that’s on you.

[sgarland]

And you have to hire people to do CloudOps. It is the same; if you think otherwise, you’re not at scale.

I promise you, running a DB in RDS is almost as difficult as running it on metal or a VM, except that when things go wrong, you don’t have as much insight into why.

Running a Linux server is not hard.