This is the fallacy that Amazon sold everyone on: that the cloud has no headache or managment needed. This is manifestly untrue. It's also untrue that bare metal takes lots of management time. I have multiple Dell rack servers colocated in several different datacenters, and I don't spend any time at all managing them. They just run.
> This is the fallacy that Amazon sold everyone on
I’ve been working at a place for a long time and we have our own data centers. Recently there has been a push to move to the public cloud and we were told to go through AWS training. It seems like the first thing AWS does in its training is spend a considerable amount of time on selling their model. As an employee who works in infrastructure, hearing Amazon sell so hard they the company doesn’t need me anymore is not exactly inspiring.
After that section they seem to spend a considerable amount of time on how to control costs. These are things no one really thinks about currently, as we manage our own infra. If I want to spin up a VM and write a bunch of data to it, no one really cares. The capacity already exists and is paid for, adding a VM here or there is inconsequential. In AWS I assume we’ll eventually need to have a business justification for every instance we stand up. Some servers I run today have value, but it would be impossible to financially justify in any real terms when running in AWS where everything has a very real cost assigned to it. What I do is too detached from profit generation, and the money we could save is mostly theoretical, until something happens. I don’t know how this will play out, but I’m not excited for it.
I can confirm this.
The AWS mandatory training I did in the past was 100% marketing of their own solutions, and tests are even designed to make you memorize their entire product line.
The first two levels are not designed for engineers: they're designed for "internal salespeople". Even Product Managers were taking the certification, so they would be able to recommend AWS products to their teams.
As a business owner that pays the hardware bill, what you see as the benefit of your current environment - or a downside of moving to the cloud - I see in a completely different light. To some extent I’d be upset with arbitrary amounts of paid-for capacity just lying around with zero accountability for that spend.
> I don't spend any time at all managing them
Who does, then? Even with automatic updates, one can assume some level of maintenance is required for long-term deployments.
Don’t get me wrong, I love running stuff bare metal for my side projects, but scaling is difficult without any ops.
No one. I have automatic backups with proxmox backup server. Updates are automatic and deployments are automated.
You miss the good time spent debugging a firmware issue, which leads to packet drop on the NIC (or data corruption on the nvme)
I do not miss that crap