Hacker News Reader

Comment by benterix | Hacker News Reader

> As the fortunes of AWS et al rose and rose and rose, I kept looking at their pricing at features and kept wondering what I was missing.

You are not the only one. There are several factors at play but I believe one of the strongest today is the generational divide: the people lost the ability to manage their own infra or don't know it well enough to do it well so it's true when they say "It's too much hassle". I say this as an AWS guy who occasionally works on on-prem infra.[0]

[0] As a side note, I don't believe the lack of skills is the main reason organizations have problem - skills can be learned, but if you mess up the initial architecture design, fixing that can easily take years.

View on HN

> I don't believe the lack of skills is the main reason organizations have problem

IDK. More and more I see the argument of “I don’t know, and we are not experts in xxx” as a winning argument of why we should just spend money on 3rd party services and products.

I have seen people getting paid 700k plus a year spend their entire stay at companies writing papers about how they can’t do something and the obvious solution is to spend 400k plus to have some 3rd party handle it, and getting the budget.

Let’s not get into what the conversation looks like when somebody points out that we might have an issue if we are paying somebody 700k to hire somebody else temporarily for 400k each year, and that we should find these folks who can do it for 400k and just hire Them.

All this to say that being a SWE in many companies today requires no ability to create software that solves business problems. But rather some sort of quasi system administrator manager who will maybe write a handful of DSL scripts over the course of their career.

It’s also human capital/resource allocation. We thought about spinning up our own servers at my last gig; we had the talent in house but that talent was busy building the product, not managing servers. I suppose it depends on what your need is as well.

I see your point but my perspective on this shifted over the years. Whatever infra you set up, whether it's the public cloud or on prem, there is always the initial cost (starting with a simple account for small orgs, a landing zone for larger ones etc.) and this applies to every service, it's just registered in the books in a slightly different way. For example, whn you look at my Jira tickets, on prem we're patchng servers, and in the cloud we're usually updating container images. These two are not that different and you need to set aside some time for that. It's the same with upgrading Postgres on prem and RDS Postgres between major versions - you need to arrange the service window with product teams, do the migration on lower layers first and if all goes well you move on to prod.

Of course, many infra activities take less time in the public cloud. E.g. control plane maintenance and upgrades on EKS are managed by AWS and are mostly painless so you never worry about stuff like etcd. On the other hand, there is a ton of stuff you need to know anyway to operate AWS in a proficient and safe way so I'm not convinced the difference is that huge today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com