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Comment by syrusakbary | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR: they want to rip you off less aggressively, so you don't ditch them on the short term.

Cloud computing has become so expensive that so many companies are moving away from it. And for good reason.

The only providers that are actually reasonable on pricing at the moment are OVH and Hetzner... by an order of magnitude (or two) cheaper than Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, Vercel, etc.

Trusting for any of the latter companies to not rip you off is like trusting a wolf to take care of the sheep herd. It just doesn't make any sense, as their incentives are many times at the opposite spectrum than their customers.

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I expect almost everyone who tries to rebel and go "on prem" will flame out and come running back to the cloud

Ops talent has really dumbed down over the last decade or so (sorry no polite way to say it). Long gone are the days when the ops engineers were talented devs who just liked hanging out at datacenters. Nowadays most of them are just button pushers who are good for standing up SaaS stacks or other simple tasks, but I'd never ask any I've dealt with in the last ten years to build out a datacenter presence from nothing. Most have never set foot in a datacenter. On top of that, most modern ops teams have been downsized (thanks to cloud) that they wouldn't have the hands to get the job done.

Even for good ops people, it can be very hard to capacity-plan and understand what appropriate/affordable/useful hardware is. Most ops folks today have probably never purchased servers for production deployments.

AWS will be happy to welcome these companies back after their on-prem dreams die.

>Ops talent has really dumbed down over the last decade or so

Counterpoint, the ops required for your own infrastructure has greatly dumbed down.

It might surprise you, but OEM hardware solution have greatly evolved and simplified the same.

Now I can setup a core switch running 100 GBs with failovers by just plugging in some cables between them, setting a flag and they immediately start replicating config between themselves.

>Even for good ops people, it can be very hard to capacity-plan and understand what appropriate/affordable/useful hardware is. Most ops folks today have probably never purchased servers for production deployments.

I'll shock you once again, the same way AWS has sales and support departments that help spoonfeed what you need.

So do the hardware OEMs. I can get complete solution walkthroughs with Dell for example.

> Now I can setup a core switch running 100 GBs with failovers by just plugging in some cables

no ops person I have worked with in the last ten years knows what a switch is, and this is over many companies both startup and bigtech

no different for storage, compute...the experience and aptitude gap at most companies, even tech companies, is profound

ops has become devops, netops is no longer in their skillset

You missed a few "damn Millennials" in those comments.

Anecdotally, your comments do not line up with my experience at all. Not only is our Sr SysAdmin providing sage wisdom and networking guidance to our DevOps team, but several of our Jr guys are taking the time to learn networking specifically (certs and all). In fact, we'll have a few new Juniper specialists in 6 months or so.

I find this difficult to accept... none of your coworkers ever built their own PC? Set up their own home network?

It's believable for the kinds of organizations that the poster clearly works for.

You are obviously having enormous difficulty attracting good ops and infra programmers, but that's mostly going to be due to the obvious lack of respect and probably abysmal pay you are offering.

I would run away from an interview at a company you work for as fast as I possibly could just based on what you've said so far. And if I worked for you I'd quit.

Case in point, you seem completely incapable of understanding how your own lack of expertise and awful pay has driven all the experienced infra people to work for cloud vendors where they can get paid what they deserve and not have to grovel before a bunch of shitty javascript devs or equivalent.

Orgs like yours are trying to hire infra people the way you would hire a web developer. That isn't viable now and has never been viable. Infra roles are (or at least should be for any functional organization) more senior than product roles.

Counterpoint: I think that just means that on prem needs to close the tooling gap some. Cloud was a centralized point of leverage where improved tooling became worth investing in, but now we're at a point where cloud is vulnerable to somebody following in their footsteps by making on prem not require as much tending.

You still won't be able to do it with idiot monkeys. You just have to enable a small team of strong people. It may be getting harder to find those people, but it's not so bad if you only need a handful of them.

https://oxide.computer/ is shooting for this space, from what I can tell?

Ops talent didn't disappear, it just got centralized in Amazon/Google/Microsoft. Now that those companies are laying off thousands, it is likely that competent ops people with data-center experience will end up on the job market.

Standard disclaimer: Andy Jassy is my skip * 7 manager.

He has said plenty of times in public statements that less than 5% of all cloud spend is on any cloud provider.

https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jas...

Eh, it depends. I've seen such inefficient use of cloud providers. Really depends on what cloud users need to do.

> Cloud computing has become so expensive that so many companies are moving away from it

Net? Sales figures don't show this.

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