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100% spot on. You can tell this is written by an IC engineer and not a manager/director who would be well aware of the resource costs of doing all of the manual install/configuration work outlined in the article.

Not necessarily. Professional managers can overvalue managed service because they perceive scarcity of skilled resources. Cloud and managed services has an overall negative effect on engineers ability to develop talent thereby exacerbating the scarcity issue. It’s actually harmful for managers as well… over time we’ll need less of them too (since they outsourced part of the job of managing).

Having been in both positions, my experience is that a whole lot of the idea that cloud is "cheaper" comes from people without awareness on how much of a commodity the skill set to set up and manage non-cloud setups is. You can reduce this all to predictable monthly bills scalable up and down by small fractions of headcount with ease most places.

At the very small scale when trying to start something, do what you're comfortable with, because whatever you're not is likely to cost you time.

Above that, it's down to what your margins are like, and how large a part the hosting is, but it's rare for cloud to be the cheaper option. Certainly not at list prices - while you're small enough to pay list prices you're being screwed over massively.

  > how much of a commodity the skill set to set up and manage non-cloud setups is.

I've seen so many teams failing this

So many little teams actually managing non-cloud setups

"Commodity" ? Not here

Yes, commodity. That doesn't mean anyone bothered to hire for that skill at your employers, but you can go out and hire this skill by the hour from any number of providers.

The same problem of teams lacking ops skills exists in companies doing cloud stuff too - often because they've bought the fiction that cloud doesn't need devops.

Or even an IC that is new to setting up infra and so they relish it. Do it a couple of times and you start appreciating managed solutions

After spending a lot of my time doing both, I can offer some perspective on that. It's not that I disagree, and many people feel the same as you, but very often it results from underestimating the time, experience and knowledge needed to create a secure and efficient cloud environment. Also, RDS makes many things easier for you (but also less flexible), but some things can't be automated and still require manual intervention like major version upgrades.

Same. I love RDS. It's amazingly convenient and I use it when I can justify it. It's also really expensive and I can - and have - easily build postgres setups w/replication across multiple data centers in several countries and still come out cheaper (including time spent) than anything remotely similar capacity in RDS. It's not hard, but it's more work than me, and so I'm happy to let AWS do it when I work somewhere where we can afford it.

Cloud has a role many places, but not in setups that are cost sensitive at scale.

"The cloud isn't cheaper than running your own infra, but it's sure as hell cheaper than running your own infra + paying someone to help you run it."

Two different things: 1. infrastructure (computers) and 2. running the infrastructure (running the computers)

Obviously, purchasing computers is more expensive that not purchasing them, i.e., using someone else's computers. The later is known, in marketing terms, as "cloud computing".

The remaining question is whether (a) paying for running own computers is less or more expensive than (b) paying for running someone else's computers, i.e., cloud computing. Or whether the costs are the same.

For some, the fundamental problem posed by "cloud computing" is not the cost. It is the fact that "the cloud" is someone else's computers. Handling data that does not belong to them. In some cases having customers share the same computers with each other.

>Yes it is cheaper to run all this stuff yourself on a VPS but you still "pay" for those things with your time.

There's also liability. If you pay someone for services rendered, you can throw liability on them. If you run stuff yourself, you're liable.

Data breach at <cloud> for your services? Hang them out to dry. Data breach on your own server? You're fucked.

Unless you're huge, you'll find most providers will limit their liability to the cost of the service, which is usually a rounding error of your risk.

If you think you're covered in any meaningful way with a standard contract, you most likely didn't read their terms.

If liability is a concern, you need insurance.

I'll believe it when I see it. There are major security breaches every year, and I have never heard any company get fined or taking any responsibility. If LastPass and Okta can get away with leaking passwords, then google (or any other cloud provider) can get away with absolutely anything.