I'm fan of cheap VPSes too, but I'd like to have things like metrics out of the box
Getting metrics on that is not a hard problem, there are various projects that are relatively simple to set up.
If you want to make it easier manage resources, metrics out of the box, and avoid (hoster) lock-in then I'd use a hyper visor distro like Proxmox VE (disclaimer, am a dev there) or the like, and you can migrate (or backup/restore) VMs or Containers easily to other providers. That gives you a (relatively) simple web-interface to manage most things and also opens the possibility to just add a second or third dedicated host down the line to scale out, if those new hosts are in the same DC or have a good interconnect (latency wise) you could even cluster the nodes.
I can set up Proxmox VE as hyper visor, some container for each DBs, load balancer in front and some app in about an hour max from scratch, with good testing and some bells and whistles, and here I really do not want to brag or the like, as such operations are not my job to do at all, I only know because I do that occasionally for some tests and for some private infra I just maintain out of interest - so I really want to say, if some operation-dork can do that, the engineer you hired should be able to do it at least as quick.
But yes you're right in the general point, upfront setup and frequent maintenance is naturally something you need to price in. I just think that if you have that many different parts with complex coupling to induce such a huge maintenance effort required to keep your product running, the cloud offer may not really be your salvation and just delay the fall while costing all the more.
Everyone does something for the first time once. Just because someone has not set up a hypervisor before doesn't mean they're inexperienced.
> I can set up Proxmox VE as hyper visor, some container for each DBs, load balancer in front and some app in about an hour max from scratch,
And I can spin up containers + load balancer on AWS in less than five minutes. That doesn't mean that it's just an easy thing to do. (although, this specific example is).
> upfront setup and frequent maintenance is naturally something you need to price in. <...> the cloud offer may not really be your salvation and just delay the fall while costing all the more.
Agreed 100% on both counts.
Wait, what? If you never did something, then you're unexperienced, ain't you?
Experienced != Knows 100% of things.
I'm sorry, but all that stuff you describe doesn't bring any business value. My customers don't care what hypervisor I'm running, so I don't care either. PaaS means someone else deals with it, forever. The last time I had to employ an ops (or devops) person was 2007.
Also, it doesn't take a week.
You're assuming that this is for recurringly set up infrastructure. Sometimes infra is set up once and maintained, othertimes it's set up and spun down. It's also not always automated. The time spent automating something like that might not be worth it in the medium to even long term.
> Also, it doesn't take a week.
The actual amount of time it takes doesn't matter; if it's a day or a month. what matters is costing the time spent on setting it up and maintaining it, and pricing that against AWS costs.
For a large company, it's not about $ cost, it's about risk management and avoiding cost centers.