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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

This fiction remains that AWS requires no specialist expertise.

And your own computers require expertise so expensive and frightening that no sane company would host their own computers.

How Amazon created this alternate reality should be studied in business schools for the next 50 years. Amazon made the IT industry doubt its own technical capabilities so much that the entire industry essential gave up on the idea that it can run computer systems, and instead bought into the fabulously complex and expensive and technically challenging cloud systems, whilst still believing they were doing the simplest and cheapest thing.

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Amazon didn't create it. I was there for the mass cloud migrates of the last 15 years. It isn't that AWS requires no specialist expertise, it's that it's a certain kind of expertise that's easier to plan for and manage. Managing physical premises, hardware upgrade costs, etc are all skills your typical devops jockey doesn't need anymore. Unless you're fine with hosting your company's servers under your desk, it's the hidden costs of metal that makes businesses move to cloud.

Fortunately there are companies like Deft, OVH, Hetzner, Equinix, etc that handle all of that for you for a flat fee and while achieving economies of scale.

Colocation is rarely worth it unless you have non-standard requirements. If you just need a general-purpose machine, any of the aforementioned providers will sort you out just fine.

I agree. If you're doing general-purpose things, using a company like the one you mentioned is just cloud but with extra steps

This is a strawman that keeps getting brought up, but nobody's claiming that. The difference remains though and the scale depends on what exactly do you consider as an alternative. Renting a couple servers will cost you in availability/resilience and extra hardware management time. Renting a managed rack will cost you in the above and premium on management. Doing things yourself will cost you in extra contracts / power / network planning, remote hands and time to source your components.

Almost everything that the AWS specialist needs to know comes in after that and has some equivalent in bare metal world, so those costs don't disappear either.

In practice there are extra costs which may or may not make sense in each case. And there are companies that don't reassess their spending as well as they should. But there's no alternative realty really. (As in, the usually discussed complications of bare metal are not extremely overplayed)

AWS does require some expertise to master considering the sheet number of products and options. Tick the wrong box and cost increases by 50% etc.

Different solutions work best for different companies.

That's what he's saying.

>"This fiction remains that AWS requires no specialist expertise. And your own computers require expertise so expensive and frightening that no sane company would host their own computers."

Each of these statements is utter BS

PS. Oopsy I just read their third paragraph ;)

Read their third paragraph. They completely agree with you

LOL Sorry. I was shooting from the hip. Thanks.

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