So their AWS bill is $500k/year.
Hire one person to buy, configure, manage hardware is what? $250k/year? And is this self-hosting more reliable than AWS? For an email service, you'd think that you want the most reliable host.
Weird.
Hire one person to buy, configure, manage hardware is what? $250k/year? And is this self-hosting more reliable than AWS? For an email service, you'd think that you want the most reliable host.
Weird.
This point gets raised every single time bare-metal comes up for discussion and at this point I'm not sure if people are legitimately unaware or if there are hidden agendas at play.
There are plenty of providers out there who will handle the logistics for you with an interface similar to AWS EC2 - ask for server and get SSH access in minutes/days/weeks (depending if it's an off-the-shelf or custom build).
From there, your existing DevOps guy (which you must have to navigate AWS' complexity) can take over.
It's only at either extremely large scale or very unusual requirements that managing your own hardware makes sense. Until then, you will never be able to beat the economies of scale of managed bare-metal providers.
I am sorry but how's it different from leaving BigCloud for SmallCloud? That's like saying, I'd no longer use Java/Kotlin because Oracle/Google but I'll however use Clojure because JVM.
> Hire one person to buy, configure, manage hardware is what? $250k/year? And is this self-hosting more reliable than AWS?
A company which has a total AWS bill of $500k/yr is a very small one (the article says 500K is just the RDS/ES bill, so total is surely much higher for them).
Our (tiny startup) AWS bill is ~200K/yr and the amount of compute and storage we do could very easily be handled by one single physical server.
Now, sure, if we went to self-hosted we'd split that into multiple servers for redundancy and growth headroom, but in any case definitely less than a dozen boxes.
You don't hire anyone to install and manage the hardware at that scale. Someone from the ops team goes to the colo for a day or two to set it all up and then you only need to go back when something needs replacement, which at that small scale is going to be very rarely.
That's exactly what we did at a previous startup and the company grew to many, many hundreds of people before there was so much infrastructure that it became worth thinking about hiring a dedicated person. By that time you'd be in the 10s of millions in AWS spend.
Go back and re-read :)
They [believe that they] don't need to hire anyone. They already have a staff of ops folks that run their cloud operations. And those folks will run their on-prem operations.
If you're constantly installing stuff then you're scaling up a lot, and that's the level where it would make sense to have someone hired dedicated for it.
You can also rent hardware.
the thing is: cloud ops are also quite complex but it's a different kind of complexity. I don't know how many people are required.
The largest teams I've been on have been cloud deployments, and some of the smallest teams were bare-metal; but that's just an anecdote.
If you're "cloud native" you've already architected your stack to be horizontally-scalable and distributed (partly because the cloud is so expensive that running at peak load capability all the time would bankrupt you) so hardware failure should matter even less.
Outside of expensive Silicon Valley and FAANGs, where do you get this $250k/Year ? I think most of us on HN are normalizing this whole "devs make 250k/year" thing when in reality, it is a tiny percentage of people. Tiny when you look at the entire ecosystem.
He also did not mention if they are going to self-host, colocate, or rent bare metal in a more traditional host (like softlayer). Probably colocate as I think that’s how they used to run?
Both your points are still valid though.
If it's $250k each, that's already $500k. Unless they can find someone who can do both for... $300k?
I don't know.
He doesn't provide enough details to make the math work.
Silicon Valley culture isn't nearly so critical or valuable that your organization requires it in order to do the necessary work.
I think you already pay this guy to manage your AWS instances. so you get the benefit of the full 500k
Sure, it is not "that complicated" for basic stuff, simple sites, hobby projects or overall quick'n dirty solutions because you're under a budget, as with everything.
Doing infrastructure properly, with SLAs and a very high level of availability and redundancy (both in systems, and in people with the know-how) is incredibly complicated in my opinion.
I bet what they're going to save on the the Cloud provider is going to be spent (and probably even more) in salaries, if they keep the same levels of service.
Specially true considering they pay pretty good salaries.