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Comment by WJW | Hacker News Reader

Ansible and Hetzner may cost 3$ a month, but it also costs several hours of dev time to set up and probably a few hours per year to keep up with certificate renewal, domain name renewal, maybe doing some package upgrades in response to newly discovered CVEs (that you ARE checking regularly, right? RIGHT?), etc.

If your time is free, great. If you REALLY like ansible and want to do it at a discounted rate, also fine. But for most people and companies, dev time comes at a rate of ~50$ per hour. For that amount of hours you don't even get scalability, documentation, failover and a host of other things that Vercel provides.

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This seems like a good trade compared to wasting hundreds of hours on a failed migration because Vercel decided beta features are ready for production.

Not to mention you’re learning transferable skills and not a proprietary stack from a company that may not exist in ten years.

Why would you waste hundreds of hours migrating to a setup that takes at most 10 to create? And if your team is indeed incompetent enough that it takes them hundreds of hours to migrate away from Vercel, what makes you think they can successfully manage a bare metal setup on Hetzner without shitting the bed sooner or later?

Also Ansible was quite hip 10 years ago but I'd hardly call it a transferable skill anymore. Most shops seem to have migrated away from it already.

> I’d hardly call it a transferable skill

Depends if you’re running VMs (or bare metal). As cloud repatriation builds, I expect Ansible / Puppet / Chef demand to rise.

How is the biggest configuration management not a transferable skill? And what has this todo with shops?

That Ansible and Hetzner approach doesn’t sound unreasonable if that is all there is to it

Everything you mentioned can and should be automated.

Which costs even more dev time (and thus more money) to build, especially if you want the automation to be dependable enough that it can run without constant monitoring. Again, fine if you are doing it as a hobby and your time is free but a very questionable use of your time if it costs any normal amount of money.

This comes down to a skill issue. Not as in “you don’t have the innate skill to do this,” but as in “you haven’t learned the skill such that it doesn’t take forever to do.”

If you want to fork money over to Vercel every month, fine, but assume that this can’t be done reliably and safely while also not taking forever. Did I invest a lot of time in the past learning and honing these skills? Of course. Now they’re useful for something beyond a hobby.

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