Comment by Aurornis
10 hours ago
One of the biggest problems with the self-hosted situations I’ve seen is when the senior engineers who set it up leave and the next generation has to figure out how to run it all.
In theory with perfect documentation they’d have a good head start to learn it, but there is always a lot of unwritten knowledge involved in managing an inherited setup.
With AWS the knowledge is at least transferable and you can find people who have worked with that exact thing before.
Engineers also leave for a lot of reasons. Even highly paid engineers go off and retire, change to a job for more novelty, or decide to try starting their own business.
>With AWS the knowledge is at least transferable
unfortunately it lot of things in AWS that also could be messed up so it might be really hard to research what is going on. For example, you could have hundreds of Lambdas running without any idea where original sources and how they connected to each-other, or complex VPCs network routing where some rules and security groups shared randomly between services so if you do small change it could lead to completely difference service to degrade (like you were hired to help with service X but after you changes some service Y went down and you even not aware that it existed)
Not much different from how it worked in companies I used to work for. Except the situation was even worse as we had no api or UI to probe for information.
There are many great developers who are not also SREs. Building and operating/maintaining have their different mindsets.