[Manfred]

Companies buy cloud services because they want to reduce in-house server management and operations, for them it's a trade-off with hiring the right people. But you are right, when you can find the right people doing it yourself can be a lot cheaper.

[mrweasel]

In some sense I'm starting to think it has more to do with accounting. Hardware, datacenters and software licenses (unless it's a subscription, which is probably is these days) are capital expenses, cloud is an operation expense. Management in a lot of companies hates capital expenditures, presumable because it forces long term thinking, i.e. three to five years for server hardware. Better to go the cloud route and have "room for manoeuvrability". I worked for a company that would hire consultants, because "you can fire those at two weeks notice, with no severance". Sure, but they've been here for five years now, at twice the cost of actual staff. Companies like that also loves the cloud.

Whether or not cloud is viable for a company is very individual. It's very hard to pin point a size or a use case that will always make cloud the "correct" choice.

[whyagaindavid]

Another point (but my common observation) is the responsibility. By going SaaS or using cloud - any kind of data protection, rules/responsibility etc is moved away. and in many ways it is better - Google, dropbox or Onedrive will have better PR to take the pain if something goes crazy. Tickbox compliance is easy.

[duped]

Something I know nothing about is whether the depreciation on server hardware outpaces the value it creates for a business, creating a tax incentive to own your own metal.

[fnoef]

Right... That's why the hire "AWS Certified specialist ninja"

[Tepix]

I get the feeling that with LLMs in the mix, in-house server management can do a lot more than it used to.

[tgv]

Perhaps it saves some time looking through the docs, but do you really trust an LLM to do the actual work?

[windex]

Yes and an LLM checks it as well. I am yet to find a sysadmin task that an LLM couldn't solve neatly.

[jdkoeck]

A nice bonus is that sysadmin tasks tend to be light in terms of token usage, that’s very convenient given the increasingly strict usage limits these days.

[andoando]

Yes, with a lot of reviewing what its doing/asking questions, 100%

[fragmede]

By this point? Absolutely. They still get stuck in rabbit holes and go down the wrong path sometimes, so it's not fully fire and forget, but if you aren't taking advantage of LLMs to perform generic sysadmin drudgery, you're wasting your time that could be better spent elsewhere.

[mattbee]

The internet of 20 years ago was awash with info for running dedicated servers, fragmented and badly-written in places but it was all there. I can absolutely believe LLMs would enable more people to find that knowledge more easily.