> I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this
I'm not. It seems to be happening a lot. Any time a topic about not using AWS comes up here, or on Reddit there a sudden surge of people appearing out of nowhere shouting down anyone who suggests other options. It's honestly starting to feel like paid shilling.
I don’t think it’s paid shilling, it’s dogma that reflects where people are working here. The individual engineers are hammers and AWS is the nail.
AWS/Azure/GCP is great, but like any tool or platform you need to do some financial/process engineering to make an optimal choice. For small companies, time to market is often key, hence AWS.
Once you’re a little bigger, you may develop frameworks to operate efficiently. I have apps that I run in a data center because they’d cot 10-20x at a cloud provider. Conversely, I have apps that get more favorable licensing terms in AWS that I run there, even though the compute is slower and less efficient.
You also have people who treat AWS with the old “nobody gets fired for buying IBM” mentality.
I think a lot of engineers who remember the bare metal days have legitimate qualms about going back to the way that world used to work especially before containerization/Kubernetes.
I imagine a lot of people who use Linux/AWS now started out with bare metal Microsoft/VMWare/Oracle type of environments where AWS services seemed like a massive breath of fresh air.
I remember having to put in orders for pallets of servers which then ended up storage somewhere because there were not enough people to carry and wire them up and/or there wasn't enough rack space to install them.
Having an ability to spin up a server or a vm when you need it without having to ask a single question is very liberating. Sometimes such elasticity is exactly what's needed. OTOH other people's servers aren't always the wise choice, but you have to know both environments to make the right choice, and nowadays I feel most people don't really know anything about bare metal.
I spin up a VM on my xen vm estate whenever I want it with just some clickops or teraform (depending on the environment)
What do you think the pallets of servers were intended for
That's the beauty of VMs.
Luckily, Amazon is far from the only VM provider out there, so this discussion doesn't need to be polarized between "AWS everything" and "on-premise everything". You can rent VMs elsewhere for a fraction of the cost. There are many places that will rent you bare metal servers by the hour, just as if they were VMs. You can even mix VMs and bare metal servers in the same datacenter.
Not just spin up a server, you can spin up whole regions, even in foreign countries, at the click of a button.
the best is having rackspace & power but not enough cooling, hahaha murder me
That only happens when you have your own data center. That's a whole different issue and most people with their own hardware don't have their own data centers as it's not particularly cost efficient except at incredibly large scale.
Containers with k8s and bare metal aren't mutually exclusive.
If anything it enables a hybrid environment
No doubt -- there are plenty of downsides to running your own stuff. I'm not anti-AWS. I'm pro-efficiency, and pro making deliberate choices. If there's a choice is spend $10M extra on AWS because the engineers get a good vibe -- there should be a compelling reason why that vibe is worth $10M. (And there may well be)
Look at what Amazon/Google/Microsoft does. If you told me you advocate running your own power plants, I'd eyeroll. But... if you're as large a power consumer as a hyper-scaler, totally different story. Google and Microsoft are investing in lighting up old nuclear plants.
My company runs all their own bare metal data centers but it's containerized, and it's basically magic.
The tooling should be getting close to manage this on-prem now, with VM's, K8s clusters, networking, storage, etc. I know that oxide computers exists, and they look fantastic, but there has got to be more 'open' ways to run things on your own Dell/HP/Supermicro servers with NVMe drives. Especially since VMware has jacked up their prices since being acquired.
Talos OS looks really interesting. But I also need the storage parts, networking parts, etc.
I run several Talos clusters (provisioned by Cluster API) on commodity hardware which is part of a Proxmox cluster in my homelab
teams can't even run k8s in the cloud. teams I've seen running k8s on prem have always been disaster shows. productivity in the gutter.
the tooling to manage on prem is truly awful, and attempts to port the nice semantics of cloud have all slowly died (who remembers localstack?)
I don't think it's paid shilling, I think it's people who got bamboozled into learning cloud-provider-clickops over actual systems work and feel threatened when you suggest hyperscalers aren't the future.
Nailed it. I’ve found that people get super defensive when you inadvertently reveal that they don’t know the fundamentals of their job.
It’s the current version of CCIE or some of the other certs. People pay money to learn how to operate AWS, other thing erode the value of their investment.
A lot of people here's careers have been made by moving into AWS. A lot of people's future careers will be made by moving out of AWS. That's just the tech treadmill in action.
Do what works best for your situation.
I'm not either. I used to do fully managed hosting solutions at a datacenter. I had to do everything from hardware through debugging customer applications. Now, people pay me to do the same but on cloud platforms and the occasional on-prem stuff. In general, the younger people I've come across have no idea how to set anything up. They've always just used awscli, the AWS Console, or terraform. I've even been ridiculed for suggesting people not use AWS. Thing is, public cloud really killed my passion for the industry in general.
Beyond public cloud being bad for the planet, I also hate that it drains companies of money, centralizes everyone's risk, and helps to entrench Amazon as yet another tech oligarchic fiefdom. For most people, these things just don't matter apparently.
> Thing is, public cloud really killed my passion for the industry in general.
Similar here, I think. I got into Computer Science because I liked software... the way it was. Now I truly think that most software completely sucks.
The thing is that it has grown so much since then, that most developers come from a different angle.
I think in 5-10 years there is going to be very profitable consulting on setting up data center infrastructure, and de-clouding for companies.
Why do you think public cloud is worse for the environment than a private dc? I'd expect the larger dcs to be more energy efficient.
To offer immediate turn around, a cloud vendor has to over buy and have more machines in the rack than are necessary. Often, those machines have to be powered on, and they have to be rather powerful machines. Just think of S3 and think how many machines must be available and how many HDDs/SSDs have to be installed in every machine. This is an insane amount of power and material.
Possible. However what is more likely is that a lot of long-time tech workers have vested stocks or investments in Amazon and they dont want the cash cow (AWS) to get hampered. And similarly a lot of tech workers have invested in AWS skills, so they cant risk those skills becoming less valued in the marketplace due to alternatives.
If your spend is less than a few thousand per month, using cloud services is a no-brainer. For most startups starting up, their spend is minimal, so launching on the cloud is the default (and correct!) option.
Migrating to lower cost options thereafter when scaling is prudent, but you "build one to throw away", as it were.
> It's honestly starting to feel like paid shilling.
the companies selling Cloud are also massive IT giants with unlimited compute resources and extensive online marketing operations.
like of fucking course they're using shillbots, they run the backend shillbot infrastructure.
they literally have LLM chatbot agents as an offering, and it's trivially easy to create fake users and repost / retweet last weeks comments to create realistic looking accounts, when then shill hard for whatever their goals are.
I think people that lived through the time where their severs are down because the admin forgot to turn them back on after he drove 50 miles back from the colo might not want to live through that again
It's 2025 not 2005, if you're still rolling out hardware that requires a physical push of a button to power up theres something very, very wrong.
Physical buttons are good. Physical buttons can't be backdoored or rooted.
I think some of that is a certain group of people will do anything to play with the new shiny stuff. In my org it's cloud and now GPU.
The cloud stuff is extremely expensive and doesn't work any better than our existing solutions. Like a commentator said below, it's insidious as your entire organization later becomes dependent on that. If you buy a cloud solution, you're also stuck with the vendor deciding to double the cost of the product once you're locked in.
The GPU stuff is annoying as all of our needs are fine with normal CPU workloads today. There are no performance issues, so again...what's the point? Well... somebody wants to play with GPUs I guess.
Resume-driven development. It's probably pretty much always been a thing.