[coliveira]

The end result of all this is that the percentage of people who know how to implement systems without AWS/Azure will be a single digit. From that point on, this will be the only "economic" way, it doesn't matter what the prices are.

[couscouspie]

That's not a factual statement over reality, but more of a normative judgement to justify resignation. Yes, professionals that know how to actually do these things are not abundantly available, but available enough to achieve the transition. The talent exists and is absolutely passionate about software freedom and hence highly intrinsically motivated to work on it. The only thing that is lacking so far is the demand and the talent available will skyrocket, when the market starts demanding it.

[eitally]

They actually are abundantly available and many are looking for work. The volume of "enterprise IT" sysadmin labor dwarfs that of the population of "big tech" employees and cloud architects.

[organsnyder]

I've worked with many "enterprise IT" sysadmins (in healthcare, specifically). Some are very proficient generalists, but most (in my experience) are fluent in only their specific platforms, no different than the typical AWS engineer.

[toomuchtodo]

Perhaps we need bootcamps for on prem stacks if we are concerned about a skills gap. This is no different imho from the trades skills shortage many developed countries face. The muscle must be flexed. Otherwise, you will be held captive by a provider "who does it all for you".

"Today, we are going to calculate the power requirements for this rack, rack the equipment, wire power and network up, and learn how to use PXE and iLO to get from zero to operational."

[organsnyder]

This might be my own ego talking (I see myself as a generalist), but IMHO what we need are people that are comfortable jumping into unfamiliar systems and learning on-the-fly, applying their existing knowledge to new domains (while recognizing the assumptions their existing knowledge is causing them to make). That seems much harder to teach, especially in a boot camp format.

[toomuchtodo]

As a very curious autodidact, I strongly agree, but this talent is rare and can punch it's own ticket (broadly speaking). These people innovate and build systems for others to maintain, in my experience. But, to your point, we should figure out the sorting hat for folks who want to radically own these on prem systems [1] if they are needed.

[1] https://xkcd.com/705/

[eitally]

I don't really think so. That was a ship that sailed ten years ago and nearly every sysadmin who is still proficient with managing on-prem stacks has adapted to also learn how to manage VPCs in an arbitrary cloud. It's not like this is a recent change.

[torginus]

Yeah, anyone who has >10 years experience with servers/backend dev has almost certainly managed dedicated infra.

[friendzis]

> and the talent available will skyrocket, when the market starts demanding it.

Part of what clouds are selling is experience. A "cloud admin" bootcamp graduate can be a useful "cloud engineer", but it takes some serious years of experience to become a talented on prem sre. So it becomes an ouroboros: moving towards clouds makes it easier to move to the clouds.

[phil21]

> A "cloud admin" bootcamp graduate can be a useful "cloud engineer",

If by useful you mean "useful at generating revenue for AWS or GCP" then sure, I agree.

These certificates and bootcamps are roughly equivalent to the Cisco CCNA certificate and training courses back in the 90's. That certificate existed to sell more Cisco gear - and Cisco outright admitted this at the time.

[friendzis]

In part - yes. Useful as in capable of spinning up services without opening glaring security holes or bringing half of the infra down. Like with any tech, it takes experience and guardrails to use it efficiently and effectively.

[SahAssar]

> A "cloud admin" bootcamp graduate can be a useful "cloud engineer"

That is not true. It takes a lot more than a bootcamp to be useful in this space, unless your definition is to copy-paste some CDK without knowing what it does.

[selimthegrim]

Moving towards the brothel makes it easier to get away from the brothel.

[bix6]

> The only thing that is lacking so far is the demand and the talent available will skyrocket, when the market starts demanding it.

But will the market demand it? AWS just continues to grow.

[bluGill]

Only time will tell. It depends on when someone with a MBA starts asking questions about cloud spending and runs the real numbers. People promoting self hosting often are not counting all the cost of self hosting (AWS has people working 24x7 so that if something fails someone is there to take action)

[cheema33]

> AWS has people working 24x7 so that if something fails someone is there to take action..

The number of things that these 24x7 people from AWS will cover for you is small. If your application craps out for any number of reasons that doesn't have anything to do with AWS, that is on you. If your app needs to run 24x7 and it is critical, then you need your own 24x7 person anyway.

[bluGill]

All the hardware and network issues are on them. I agree that you still need your own people to support you applications, but that is only part of the problem.

[iso1631]

I've got thousands of devices over hundreds of sites in dozens of countries. The number of hardware failures are a tiny number, and certainly don't need 24/7 response

Meanwhile AWS breaks once or twice a year.

[4nonverbal-alit]

From what I've seen, if you're depending on AWS, if something fails you too need someone 24x7 so that you can take action as well. Sometimes magic happens and systems recover after aws restarts their DNS, but usually the combination of event causes the application to get into an unrecoverable state that you need manual action. It doesn't always happen but you need someone to be there if it ever happens. Or bare minimum you need to evaluate if the underlying issue is really caused by AWS or something else has to be done on top of waiting for them to fix.

[bluGill]

How many problems is AWS able to handle for you that you are never aware of though?

[Symbiote]

How many problems do you think there are?

I've only had one outage I could attribute to running on-prem, meanwhile it's a bit of a joke with the non-IT staff in the office that when "The Internet" (i.e. Cloudflare, Amazon) goes down with news reports etc our own services are all running fine.

[ragall]

Distributed systems can partly fail in many subtly different ways, and you almost never notice it because there are people on-call taking care of them.

[ragall]

It already is like that, but not because of the cloud. Those of us who begun with computers in the era of the command line were forced to learn the internals of operating systems, and many ended up turning this hobby into a job.

Youngsters nowadays start with very polished interfaces and smartphones, so even if the cloud wasn't there it would take them a decade to learn systems design on-the-job, which means it wouldn't happen anyway for most. The cloud nowadays mostly exists because of that dearth of system internals knowledge.

While there still are around people who are able to design from scratch and operate outside a cloud, these people tend to be quite expensive and many (most?) tend to work for the cloud companies themselves or SaaS businesses, which means there's a great mismatch between demand and supply of experienced system engineers, at least for the salaries that lower tier companies are willing to pay. And this is only going to get worse. Every year, many more experienced engineers are retiring than the noobs starting on the path of systems engineering.