The money you save in the cloud isn’t on hardware, it’s in not having to pay a sysadmin so you can work on business problems.
And that benefit only improves with scale.
And that benefit only improves with scale.
That's hard to derive from the same statement - there's a point after which you can afford your own 8 member SRE team across 3 timezones.
The cloud is incredibly attractive when you consider your scale problems as unknown (as a startup, the blitz scale day isn't a good time to go rack nodes yourself) & mostly as way to scale down the costs faster than physical infrastructure + associated human costs can.
I've started looking at this as slightly different model - I'm no longer hiring a good operations manager for those 8 people, I'm hiring a decent programmer who can automate and have code handling deployment tasks instead of a human being taking orders (i.e rack an NVMe + reboot this).
Honestly, even with your physical infrastructure, the trend is towards API based deployment models.
My time at Zynga working on ZCloud, migrating off EC2 to on-prem, that is what I saw. The API based deployment model + reactions from machines (on failure), was worth building everywhere - now that applies to k8s.
Many similar benefits when you have a huge for-profit entity running the infrastructure at their scale. They optimize a lot for you.
AWS almost never forcibly spins down legacy functionality, even if they stop advertising it, unless literally no one is left using it.
That's actually a selling point of AWS to enterprise: while idealistic devs may like “our cloud vendor will force us to use the latest and greatest so we don't have to have that fight”, enterprise buyers don't want “we’re going to be compelled to reengineer our working systems on someone else's timetable”.
Maybe, but you probably have to go pretty far on the cloud maturity spectrum (using cloud native services effectively, not simple VMs like EC2 or even comparatively thin services that abstract just the machine/OS layer like non-Aurora RDS) before you are saving more in local-machine-focused ops teams than you are paying in cloud-focussed ops teams. The latter are more likely to be timeslices of time of team members that are primarily developers, but its still work with a cost.
The trick is to make yourself the linchpin, so that once the site grows large enough you can never leave, as you're the only one able to keep that writhing mass of wires up and running.
Doesn't cost a dime to do this, and not more than 20 minutes of work and 10 minutes downtime from my side.
Your work isn't free. Application downtime is costing you.
Renting bare metal instead of owning does not meet this lowest bar. Getting some remote hands service on top with your rental does not change this classification.
But yes, this is outsourcing a problem for a cost.