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Comment by tmpX7dMeXU | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely feels like there’s a constant trickle of arguments from people looking to do all they can to shift the tides such that their skill set is more in demand. Or maybe it’s just an ideological obsession. I don’t know. I feel the same way whenever the “use C for everything” people catch a whiff of performance mattering and very strongly suggest that the only way to dig ourselves out of this mess is to move back to the One True Language.

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In my experience The Cloud™ requires a much larger skillset, ensuring that your ops department will never stop growing.

It also depend on what requirements your business has and who you have available. The skillets are different and they overlap in places, but one way or the other if your business is growing your operations requirements will grow.

I am hugely in favour of AWS for web startups I am involved with because 1) I know AWS very well, 2) they provide hundreds of thousands of euros/dollars of credit to startups (I think all the big cloud vendors do at this stage), 3) it's useful to have architectural flexibility, and 4) they can take on a bunch of the security and availability burden that can otherwise be very labour intensive in a small company.

Also you can pry S3 and RDS Aurora out of my cold dead hands!

I have an impression that is "avoided" in many companies by demanding from the newly hired programmers to have "cloud experience". My problem is that that usually ends up being "programmers have taken courses about the way cloud vendor Y does the job" which then actually means "the programmers had drunk the propaganda of the cloud vendor Y" which is not a directly reusable knowledge for anything than "here's how we adjust our work to be charged by the cloud vendor Y". Which I think is guaranteed to have a company which can't even imagine doing it any other way.

I believe both arguments held some merits. It all depend on the scale.

If you are a startup and/or have a limited/specialized business scope* Cloud can be the best choice.

For organizations of 4000+ people that manage 100+ applications (from different vendors) with a 90+ people IT department this is maybe not the silver bullet. At this scale you need to keep complexity and security manageable and a more traditional redondant datacenter architecture might be less of a headache than the cloud.

*PS: What I mean by "limited/specialized business scope" is for instance Twitter/Meta. Huge scale but heavily specialized around their main products and develop most of theirs application in house.

Yeah, at that scale your devs end up bogged down in cloud concerns. We can't keep anyone at big companies very long because of all the arduous infrastructure bullshit that they have to deal with. Lots of it ends up being done outside of Jira. Total mess.

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