Keeping a few racks of servers happily humming along isn't the massive undertaking that most people here seem to think it is. I think lots of "cloud native" engineers are just intimidated by having to learn lower levels to keep things running.
Keeping them humming along redundantly, with adequate power and cooling, and protection against cooling- and power failures is more of an undertaking, though. Now you are maintaining generators, UPSs and multiple HVAC systems in addition to your 'few racks of servers'.
You also need to maintain full network redundancy (including ingress/egress) and all the cost that entails.
All the above hardware needs maintenance and replacement when it becomes obsolete.
Now you are good in one DC, but not protected against tornadoes, fire and flood like you would be if you used AWS with multiple availability zones.
So, you have to build another DC far enough away, staff it, and buy tons of replication software, plus several FTEs to manage cross-site backups and deal with sync issues.
But yeah, in the long run, colocation becomes significantly cheaper than cloud. You use AWS, and you'll find yourself paying $200/month for hardware you could buy once for $2,000.
Sometimes I think people forgot colocation is an option that exists.
For $600 I can get hardware that outperforms a $1200/mo ec2. Easy.
I don't mean to call you out specifically, but I believe your comment is a perfect example of how the majority of developers have no clue what being on bare metal actually involves. You literally need to do none of these things. Cloud vendors make it sound overly complex and the myth just kinda self perpetuates because nobody knows better.
If anyone in the Bay Area is considering the move out of the cloud and wants to see in person what is really involved, I might consider putting together a group tour of one of my rack locations.
What happens when your own HVAC dies and your DC has about 4 hours until it overheats?
(I'm a software engineer who previously built and maintained racks of bare metal. Never again).
These datacenters are fed by multiple power substations, have onsite battery and generators, and contracts for delivery of fuel in the event of a disaster. But none of these things are any more your problem than if a power plant explodes knocking out an AWS region.
> > Now you are maintaining generators, UPSs and multiple HVAC systems in addition to your 'few racks of servers'.
> I don't mean to call you out specifically, but I believe your comment is a perfect example of how the majority of developers have no clue what being on bare metal actually involves. You literally need to do none of these things.
By the way, I worked for a double digit billion dollar company that built its own datacenters as well as placing resources in colos. They started out purely in colos, and put several colos out of business over HVAC and power costs (back when rack space was billed by area, not cooling). Even after that, they stayed in colos, and when I worked there, we constantly had to deal with the unreliability of colos- not just that they were smaller, with less cooling, and inadequate power, but also because they often didn't actually fulfill their contractual requirements. ATL was a great example.
If colos work for you, that's great. I just don't thinnk they are prepared to handle disasters nearly as well as the megascale cloud providers.
No, you seem to misunderstand how leased space works. If you rent a floor of an office building, the toilets flush without you having to own a water plant or redundant water pipes.
> when I worked there, we constantly had to deal with the unreliability of colos- not just that they were smaller,
It sounds like whomever was in charge of picking datacenters was shit at their job. The colocation market isn't what it used to be and it isn't just a dude with some warehouse space and swamp coolers. Colos are publicly traded companies or REITs and have good SLAs.
> I just don't thinnk they are prepared to handle disasters nearly as well as the megascale cloud providers.
I worked for a megascale cloud provider. I'm intimately familiar with the nuts and bolts of a few others. Some of it is the big owned and operated campuses you see in the glossy brochure photos, but a substantial part is also in the same colos you can lease yourself. They don't bring in any additional cooling or power over and above what the datacenter provides.
Seriously, a facility with multiple Internet connections, adequate power and cooling, passive cooling in case of outage, protection against power failures, adequate UPSes, backup generator power, and so on could be my Mom's house. There's nothing special about any of those things that makes them somehow frightening.
"buy tons of replication software"? What industry do you work in? Seriously, nobody who isn't in some clueless "enterprise" would pay good money for things that're widely available in open source.
I'm dismissive because these things aren't difficult if you've actually done them, so I can only assume you've never done them.
Rightly so, because they're cloud native engineers, not system administrators. They're intimidated by the things they don't know. It'll be a very individual calculation whether it's worth it for your enterprise to organize and maintain hardware yourself, or isn't.
And there are plenty of us who've spent time managing hardware and physical networks, transitioned to cloud, and are very happy to not be looking back.
I made the correct career choice. Downturn? What downturn?
It isn't until hardware failures happen, and that requires different skills to deal with effectively. Like the time a core networking switch presented with a dead PSU and no backups, so you Frankenstein it back to temporarily working with another switch to pull the config off of it.
With bare metal you may have to have more generalized, Jack of all trades staff to account for the unaccountable.