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Comment by LunaSea

7 hours ago

> The company did need the same exact people to manage AWS anyway.

That is incorrect. On AWS you need a couple DevOps that will Tring together the already existing services.

With on premise, you need someone that will install racks, change disks, setup high availability block storage or object storage, etc. Those are not DevOps people.

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LunaSea

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PunchyHamster  4 hours ago

> With on premise, you need someone that will install racks, change disks, setup high availability block storage or object storage, etc. Those are not DevOps people.

we have 7 racks and 3 people. The things you mentioned aren't even 5% of the workload.

There are things you figure out once, bake into automation, and just use.

You install server once and remove it after 5-10 years, depending on how you want to depreciate it. Drives die rarely enough it's like once every 2 months event at our size

The biggest expense is setting up automation (if I was re-doing our core infrastructure from scratch I'd probably need good 2 months of grind) but after that it's free sailing. Biggest disadvantage is "we need a bunch of compute, now", but depending on business that might never be a problem, and you have enough savings to overbuild a little and still be ahead. Or just get the temporary compute off cloud.

  • vel0city  27 minutes ago

    > Biggest disadvantage is "we need a bunch of compute, now"

    And depending on the problem set in question, one can also potentially leverage "the cloud" for the big bursty compute needs and have the cheap colo for the day to day stuff.

    For instance, in a past life the team I worked on needed to run some big ML jobs while having most things on extremely cheap colo infra. Extract the datasets, upload the extracted and well-formatted data to $cloud_provider, have VPN connectivity for the small amount of other database traffic, and we can burst to have whatever compute needed to get the computations done really quick. Copy the results artifact back down, deploy to cheap boxes back at the datacenter to host for clients stupid-cheap.

rcxdude  3 hours ago

Moving around the physical hardware is a truly tiny part of the actual job, it's really not relevant. (especially nowadays, see the top level comment about how you can do an insane amount (probably more than the median cloud deployment) with a fraction of a rack).

ozgrakkurt  7 hours ago

To be clear, I'm not writing about on-premise. I mean difference between managed cloud and renting dedicated servers

  • Dylan16807  6 hours ago

    Even if you do include physical server setup and maintenance, one or two days per month is probably enough enough for a couple hundred rack units.

ocdtrekkie  6 hours ago

People will install racks and swap drives for significantly less money than DevOps, lol. People who can build LEGO sets are cheaper than software developers.