Comment on Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent
noobface@lemmy.world 5 days agoI’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.