Comment by PunchyHamster
14 hours ago
> At scale (like comma.ai), it's probably cheaper. But until then it's a long term cost optimization with really high upfront capital expenditure and risk. Which means it doesn't make much sense for the majority of startup companies until they become late stage and their hosting cost actually becomes a big cost burden.
You rent a dataspace, which is OPEX not CAPEX, and you just lease the servers, which turns big CAPEX into monthly OPEX bill
Running your own DC is "we have two dozen racks of servers" endeavour, but even just renting DC space and buying servers is much cheaper than getting same level of performance from the cloud.
> This flips when you start getting into the multiple FTEs per month in cost for just the hosting. At that point you probably have additional cost measured in 5-10 FTE in staffing anyway to babysit all of that. So now you can talk about trading off some hosting FTEs for modest amount of extra staffing FTEs and make net gains.
YOU NEED THOSE PEOPLE TO MANAGE CLOUD TOO. That's what always get ignore in calculations, people go "oh, but we really need like 2-3 ops people to cover datacenter and have shifts on the on-call", but you need same thing for cloud too, it is just dumped on programmers/devops guys in the team rather than having separate staff.
We have few racks and the part related to hardware is small part of total workload, most of it is same as we would (and do for few cloud customers) in cloud, writing manifests for automation.
> YOU NEED THOSE PEOPLE TO MANAGE CLOUD TOO.
Finally, some sense! "Cloud" was meant to make ops jobs disappear, but they just increased our salary by turning us into "DevOps Engineers" and the company's hosting bill increased fivefold in the process. You will never convince even 1% of devs to learn the ops side properly, therefore you'll still end up hiring ops people and we will cost you more now. On top of that, everyone that started as a "DevOps Engineer" knows less about ops than those that started as ops and transitioned into being "DevOps Engineers" (or some flavour of it like SREs or Platform Engineers).
If you're a programmer scared into thinking AI is going to take away your job, re-read my comment.
I'm not disagreeing... but it depends on how you shift the complexity/work and how you lean into or don't lean into the services a given cloud provider offer or not.
Just database management is a pretty specialized skill, separate from development or optimizing the structures of said data... For a lot of SaaS providers, if you aren't at a point where you can afford a dedicated DBA/Ops staff just for data, that's one reason you might lean into cloud operations or hybrid ops just for dbms management, security and backups. This is a low hanging fruit in terms of cloud offerings evem... but can shift a lot of burden in terms of operational overhead.
Again, depending on your business and data models.
Honestly, the way I've seen a lot of cloud done, they need _more_ people to manage that than a sensible private cloud setup.