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Comment by morgante | Hacker News Reader

Your opinion isn't really that original. There are plenty of old-school sysadmins who will insist that the cloud is a hoax. They'll fight tooth and nail to avoid it. Eventually, someone fires them and moves to the cloud with significant savings.

There are some scenarios where it makes sense to run bare metal, but they're few and far between. If you've evaluated the (capital, operational, and human) costs of cloud vs. bare metal and bare metal came out on top, that's fine. But don't assume that other mature businesses haven't also done so.

For companies with AWS bills less than $10k/m, it'd be ludicrous to even consider bare metal.

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I believe the truth is somewhere in the middle. The hype will eventually die down and we'll see some kind of equilibrium.

I've been experimenting with "cloud over" where I only use cloud servers for spare capacity. With docker it's getting easier. My baseline CoLo has the same performance as a super high end AWS instance and costs a third as much after my fixed investment.

I still have the cloud if my box goes down or takes a big traffic hit, but I'm not paying for a bunch of cloud servers all the time either.

I've seen businesses move to the cloud and cost themselves millions of dollars in doing so. I'm not sure where you're coming from believing that cloud always offers a massive savings. It's possible that in some circumstances, cloud will be cheaper, but I actually think that more often than not, it's more expensive.

It's ludicrous that you suggest that anyone who is not willing to dive head-first into 100% cloud everything should be fired. The cloud has a place, but there's no reason that cloud should be the only option, as you appear to suggest.

I have not once said that cloud is the only option. You're arguing with a straw man.

If you're spending millions on infrastructure, you should absolutely do a rigorous analysis of whether the cloud is better or worse.

Yeah, it's not a direct quote. However, that is how I interpret the sentiment that those who fight the cloud will be fired. You suggest that's an unfair interpretation? You can say "cloud may not be the only option" all you want, but "those who oppose cloud will be fired" ensures that somehow, everyone in your organization will believe the cloud to be a supremely good option. :)

Because I do fully believe that the cloud is the superior solution for most businesses, especially those employing sysadmins.

I've seen way too many companies with full-time sysadmins maintaining only a few dozen servers. The significant cost savings come from eliminating those positions.

Who administers the servers after you eliminate those positions? Sysadmins mostly do operating system administration, not hardware maintenance. AWS boots you into an empty operating system that still needs to be configured, secured, backed up, etc. You still need sysadmins! In fact, cloud tends to require more of them because people spawn a lot of instances.

If you have a bunch of idle sysadmins because you thought you'd have to replace a system's drive every week and hired 4 extra hardware-only sysadmins, you can probably fire them without moving to the cloud and save even more money, right?

If you can treat your instances as ephemeral, it's a lot easier to manage them.

>Eventually, someone fires them and moves to the cloud with significant savings.

Significant savings is not something you get from the cloud unless you were massively over-provisioned with your hardware. In nearly every case I've seen, moving an equivalent workload to the cloud has resulted in more costs for the same size workload. But the company still made the decision to do it because it was less stuff to worry about and it made expanding that much quicker.

You pay a premium for the flexibility of the cloud.

> There are plenty of old-school sysadmins who will insist that the cloud is a hoax. They'll fight tooth and nail to avoid it. Eventually, someone fires them and moves to the cloud with significant savings.

Those "old-school sysadmins..." get hired by large cloud companies. Amazon has plenty. The cloud is just somebody else's computers.

Sure, and that's precisely the operational efficiency which comes from cloud providers.

It really really depends how you structure your application. Depending on your architecture having a few huge boxes is very much worth it, and that scales a lot better with bare metal.

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