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Comment by dvfjsdhgfv | Hacker News Reader

That's a general answer on how you can save by using the cloud, I specifically meant the "serverless" variant.

(Apart from that, I think this is a misconception - Amazon seems to have convinced people you don't need a sysadmin anymore, whereas in fact once you start exploring the whole AWS infrastructure and its complexity, you quickly realize you still need sysadmin's knowledge plus understanding of how their services work and all their quirks.)

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I understand that with AWS, you need a sysadmin. That is why I was saying with serverless (in this case, AWS Lambda) you didn't need a sysadmin. I assume it's the same with Google Functions and whatever Azure has.

But you will need other things... you need some kind of fronting system to tie things together, you need some sort of DB/Storage. And while you can get away with fewer admins, someone will be spending part of their time in a sysadmin role. It's more a matter of how much can get done with how many admins.

I get the point you are trying to make, but as AWS offers many services, I don't need a sysadmin for a DB (RDS, Dynamodb, ElasticSearch, S3) or for APIGateway nor for any coordination between systems (SNS, SES)

True serverless let's me offload that cost to AWS instead of having a sysadmin

Who maintains the database, schema, updates? Application deployments, testing, qa, updates? There's someone doing the job, even if it's fewer people, or someone with multiple hats.

> database, schema, updates

Whoever created them

> Application deployments

Build pipeline

> testing, qa

QA / Customer Support

So, still no sysadmin.

Not saying it has to be this way, just saying originally that serverless can save you money.

In fact, we are in the process of moving all our APIs over to AWS Lambda w/ ES and it's going to save us 25-50% of our EC2 costs.

We might be able too do the same since we are re-writing in another language, but without AWS Lambda, we would have never gotten that shot.

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