| Paying Amazon does not negate the need for a sysadmin!! I didn't mean to suggest that it did. Administering Amazon is a big part of my job at the moment. It's a lot of work. Bare-bones Amazon is a poor example. I should have picked, e.g., Engine Yard: someone at least one step farther up the food chain. And, even then, I'm not suggesting that hiring a cloud host will make these concerns magically go away. I'm just suggesting that any argument which assumes that these concerns have magically gone away -- rather than specifically addressing them -- is leaving something out. Meanwhile... it's a mistake to say that Amazon takes care of "only the hardware part". That's like claiming that a car company only takes care of "the hardware part" because you still have to learn how to drive in order to use their product. Among other things, Amazon provides an abstract interface for provisioning hardware. They provide a standard platform that lots of people know how to use, so that you can install pre-configured AMIs, follow canned recipes, run third-party utilities for managing EC2 hardware, ask questions on Stack Overflow, or hire people who are guaranteed to have experience with your exact platform. And they provide the ability to rent variable amounts of hardware by the minute. One thing which I expect to see on the scene any minute now are third-party hosting providers who provide similar services to Amazon with a compatible API, so that tools used for managing EC2 instances can be run transparently against the new host. |
Even with EY you have to administer anything non-standard yourself (at least that was my experience with a former employer.)
I am saying that Amazon takes care of "only the hardware part" in the same way that a trucking company might lease its trucks. Sure, maintenance, part fulfillment, repair and truck acquisition are taken care of by the leasing company, but the bulk of the business is in the logistics and operations.
I am pro-EC2 for a large class of problems, and just recommended cloudfront/s3 to a friend last night. But some people have this fantasy scenario where the cloud is a magical place where applications can live and scale horizonatlly, and the reality is that Amazon offers a very good starting ground on which to build and administer your systems. (As you know.)
I think we're largely in agreement. I apologize for minimizing the amount of legwork that Amazon takes care of for you in an attempt to stress the amount of work that still remains.