Comment by bluGill
15 hours ago
Only time will tell. It depends on when someone with a MBA starts asking questions about cloud spending and runs the real numbers. People promoting self hosting often are not counting all the cost of self hosting (AWS has people working 24x7 so that if something fails someone is there to take action)
> AWS has people working 24x7 so that if something fails someone is there to take action..
The number of things that these 24x7 people from AWS will cover for you is small. If your application craps out for any number of reasons that doesn't have anything to do with AWS, that is on you. If your app needs to run 24x7 and it is critical, then you need your own 24x7 person anyway.
All the hardware and network issues are on them. I agree that you still need your own people to support you applications, but that is only part of the problem.
I've got thousands of devices over hundreds of sites in dozens of countries. The number of hardware failures are a tiny number, and certainly don't need 24/7 response
Meanwhile AWS breaks once or twice a year.
From what I've seen, if you're depending on AWS, if something fails you too need someone 24x7 so that you can take action as well. Sometimes magic happens and systems recover after aws restarts their DNS, but usually the combination of event causes the application to get into an unrecoverable state that you need manual action. It doesn't always happen but you need someone to be there if it ever happens. Or bare minimum you need to evaluate if the underlying issue is really caused by AWS or something else has to be done on top of waiting for them to fix.
How many problems is AWS able to handle for you that you are never aware of though?
Distributed systems can partly fail in many subtly different ways, and you almost never notice it because there are people on-call taking care of them.
How many problems do you think there are?
I've only had one outage I could attribute to running on-prem, meanwhile it's a bit of a joke with the non-IT staff in the office that when "The Internet" (i.e. Cloudflare, Amazon) goes down with news reports etc our own services are all running fine.