Comment on Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent
noobface@lemmy.world 5 days agoThe 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.
loudwhisper@infosec.pub 5 days ago
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.
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).
noobface@lemmy.world 5 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?
loudwhisper@infosec.pub 5 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.