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Comment by mtnygard | Hacker News Reader

Not trying to peddle cheap skepticism here.

This article only looks at "seen" costs, and assumes that there are no "unseen" costs to running on-prem. Many companies do not have the operational maturity to run on-prem well. The result: high cost of operations, low availability, and large increase in time-to-value.

Second unseen cost: everybody becomes their own SI. So far nobody really sells the "whole stack" for running on prem. I mean hardware, network, virtualization, application, traffic mgmt, etc. I have to buy stuff from two dozen different vendors and cobble it together into a high-labor, rickety Jenga tower of stuff.

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These costs are not unseen. They are straightforward ordinary costs and fully accounted for. It only seems expensive and complicated from the perspective of someone that does not have experience with it. To someone that has done it many times before it is relatively simple and almost completely mechanical to get an excellent result. It isn't rocket science, just domain expertise around things like physical infrastructure planning and supply chains that a software developer may not have encountered before but could easily learn.

If a company was going to run their own data centers, they would presumably hire someone that knows what they are doing to lead the effort instead of trying to do it by trial and error.

> Many companies do not have the operational maturity to run on-prem well.

Isn't this why you hire domain experts?

Everybody says they're a domain expert, everybody says they want to hire domain experts but don't pay competitive wages, etc

Also in my experience, on-prem infra, on relatively cheap gear like Dell servers is highly reliable.

Yes, you have to plan, yes you have long lead times to get new gear, DC space, etc. But once it's running, failure rates are pretty low. At least in the single digit thousands and servers.

I've had to deal with much more frequent and odd types of failures on cloud infra than with on-prem.

My experience matches yours. Bulk inexpensive hardware that you can buy by the pallet is consistently very reliable over several years in my experience. I've had more reliability issues with gold-plated "enterprise" hardware and cloud services in practice.

Supply chain management and coordination is, IMHO, the most difficult part of it and is often overlooked in these discussions. Herding vendors to deliver hardware on your timeline from overseas supply chains doesn't always turn out the way you want, even with the best planning.

> It only seems expensive and complicated from the perspective of someone that does not have experience with it.

Isn't that the target audience for this sort of change?

I mean, do you see teams of networking , siteops, high availability, and security engineers hanging around doing nothing and just waiting for a company to decide to go in-house?

No, because those teams do not exist in free-range. That's something a company needs to build and train and experiment from the start until they are able to learn all the lessons.

There's also the unknown of cloud pricing in 5 years. Unless there's a monopoly, at some point, there should be at least one cloud provider who can take advantage of economies of scale and beat the cost of colocation, even with lots of machines.

You nailed it. Unseen costs are huge and a lot of people ignore it.

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