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Comment on Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent

This is quite a trite argument from my point of view. Also, this is from the perspective of the business, which I don’t particularly care about, and I tend to look from the perspective of the worker.

Additionally, the cloud allows to scale quickly, but the fact that it allows to delegate everything is a myth. It’s so much a myth that you see companies running fully on cloud with an army on people in platform teams and additionally you get finops teams, entire teams whose job is optimizing the spend of cloud. Sure, when you start out it’s 100% reasonable to use cloud services, but in the medium-long term, it’s an incredibly poor investment, because you still need people to administer the cloud plus, you need to pay a huge premium for the services you buy, which your workforce now can’t manage or build anymore. This means you still pay people to do work which is not your core business, but now they babysit cloud services instead of the actual infra, and you are paying twice.

Cloud exploded during the times of easy money at no interest, where startups had to build some stuff, IPO and then explode without ever turning a single dollar of profit. It’s a model that fits perfect in that context.

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gray@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
At least where I work, our cloud team is ~35 people who manage the whole thing.

The datacenter team? In the hundreds.

Cloud is not the answer to every infra problem, but the flexibility, time to market, and lifecycle burden are easily beneficial weighed against finops. I’m an Azure engineer myself, it’s no comparison the benefits to a managed solution vs rolling your own DC for a lot of regular business workloads and solutions. Beyond that personally I’ve been able to skill up in areas I wouldn’t be able to otherwise if I was stuck troubleshooting bad cables, rebuilding a dead RAID array, or planning VMWare scaling nonsense.

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- loudwhisper@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  But those are absolutely not the only 2 levels. Server rental can be managed easily by the same infra team who manages the cloud, for a fraction of cost.
  
  I will say more, the same exact team that spends time managing EKS clusters could manage self-managed clusters and have money to spare for additional hires.
  
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  - partial_accumen@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    I will say more, the same exact team that spends time managing EKS clusters could manage self-managed clusters and have money to spare for additional hires.
    
    Your suggestions is a large expansion of skillset needed for your alternative to the cloud solution. Your own experience in attempting to hire workers should point to the reason thats a bad idea. You’re going to need even higher skilled people, and they are going to ask for significantly more money.
    
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    loudwhisper@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I wouldn’t say it’s a large expansion of skillset, meaning it’s not massive. But yes, indeed it is problematic to find people. It is because this is a vicious circle in which companies are digging their own graves by eliminating a market for those people, which in turn means that those who would want to hire some can’t find them easily, leading to outsourcing instead. Do this for 15 years across the whole industry and it stops being an option, which is pretty much where we are today. That said, training and upskilling is always a possibility for companies who invest on their own employees and are playing the long game…
    
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noobface@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
The vast majority of on-prem infra is under-utilized, over-provisioned, and slow to adapt to the business. I spent a decade designing DC infra and the number of times I revisited a customer only to see their clusters running at 10% utilization was very, very common. Digging into their capacity planning processes didn’t help. Every team built in safety buffers to a point they could’ve sustained growth well beyond the lifecycle of the hardware. Convincing half a dozen leaders their budget would be better spent elsewhere, even coming from the sales engineer, was like pulling teeth. They were so much more afraid of getting blocked on their next capex request, they pushed for as much as they could get at outrageous growth expectations to prevent the off chance their team capacity constrained revenue growth.

I get you that it’s easy to do the same in the cloud, but you can’t return and on-prem server. A cloud VM, just shut it down and you’re done.

AWS talks about minimizing undifferentiated heavy lifting as a reason to adopted managed services and I find that largely to be true. The majority of companies aren’t differentiating their services via some low-level technology advantage that allows them to cost less. It’s a different purchasing model, a smoother workflow, or a unique insight into data. The value an organization provides to customers should be the primary focus of the business, the rest is a means to sharpen that focus.

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- loudwhisper@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  A cloud VM, just shut it down and you’re done.
  
  If this flexibility is needed, and it’s an “if”, a dedicated server does the same. But even a cloudVM is already lower level compared to other services (which are even more abstract) - like EKS, SQS, etc.
  
  The value an organization provides to customers should be the primary focus of the business, the rest is a means to sharpen that focus.
  
  In my experience this often translates in values that flows to AWS, while the company giving value to customers is stuck with millions of cloud bills each month, and a large engineering footprint that eventually needs to cut, leaving fewer and fewer people working on the product.
  
  That said, I acknowledge that cloud has business reasons to exist, I wrote an entire other post about my hate for it, but I still acknowledge that. However there are some myths that finally are getting dispelled (outsource infra and focus on your product).
  
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  - noobface@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I’d like to understand how self managing all the lower level components abstracted by the cloud is saving on headcount. Care to math that out for us?
    
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    loudwhisper@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    It depends. An EKS cluster can cost easily 20x what an equivalent cluster costs with same resources. The amount of people necessary to manage it is very close compared to a bare cluster, which depending on the scale can save hundreds of thousands or millions per year, therefore allowing extra headcount.
    
    For example, a company I worked for had a team of 6 managing all their kubernetes cluster on rented dediservers. The infra costed around 50k/year. The same clusters on EKS could be managed by 4 people (maybe?), but would have costed easily 5-600k, especially since they were beefy machines, possibly even more. That amount of money would pay for 7-8 additional headcount in local hires.
    
    Considering that in those clusters there were 40-50 postgres clusters, if moving those to RDS they would have probably looked at millions in cloud bills per year, and the effort to run those dB’s once the manifests were developed was negligible (same team was managing them). This was a tiny startup, with limited resources for internal tools and automation development.
    
    So it’s not like managing everything can save headcount, it’s that not outsourcing everything can save so much money that largely compensates for more headcount, plus you are giving money to real people, who spend local and pay taxes.
    
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