this makes no sense: can individual companies operate computing infrastructure more efficiently than cloud providers?
if not, then instead of migrating just negotiate.
if not, then instead of migrating just negotiate.
- there are a lot of companies that nowadays operates their computing infrastructure.
- there is a lot of space in the middle, you are not forced to choose just over full self-host and full-cloud, there is colocation, hosting, providers like hertzner, digital ocean and so on.
You can pay for a lot of cloud resources for that much, even when the cloud resources are massively overpriced compared to what you could manage if you had more scale.
The only other alternative is finding someone who's good enough at it to make that full time sysadmin job just a small part of their "actual" job responsibilities, but that person is pretty hard to find.
Then you get a step function cost increase building and operating all of the services your developers aren’t getting out of the box.
The cloud promises to make admin tasks easier, however I have never seen it eliminate the role of a sysadmin in practice. In my experience, most organizations that run their infra on a cloud still have dedicated admin roles (often called "DevOps" or infra teams).
Hence, I think that the claim that a sysadmin's salary is an extra expense for self-managed infrastructure is exaggerated. You may need more sysadmins for achieving the same features in a self-managed setup compared to the cloud, but it is not a linear scale.
IMHO, the biggest wins for cloud are when you can't fill up a whole machine and when your needs vary significantly throughout the day and you can scale up and down quickly and not have to pay for unused capacity.
As long as you know your predicted growth yes. Cloud providers are operating "efficiently" because they do oversubscription on a lot of services. You don't really think that those 8 vCPUs are dedicated to your VM only, do you?
Also, the thing with cloud are the managed services that make it easy for developers to process/exchange data, like Amazon SQS or cloud functions and things like this.
Like the first comment says, if you know what you are doing, it is quite easy actually to host your infrastructure on-prem.