I hate these comparisons because it's not apples to apples.
The entire point of AWS is so you don't have to get a dedicated server.
It's infra as a service.
The entire point of AWS is so you don't have to get a dedicated server.
It's infra as a service.
The point of having a private chef is so you don’t have to cook food by yourself.
It’s still extremely useful to know if the private chef is cheaper or more expensive than cooking by yourself and by how much, so you can make a decision more aware of the trade offs involved.
The key point is that being aware of the cost trade off is useful.
Getting a chef would be hiring your own devops team
But the point of AWS is that you can buy these services with very fine granularity
With cloud, you hire a private chef and ALSO have to cook the food by yourself.
You don't hire a team to maintain the server infrastructure, but you hire a team to maintain cloud infrastructure.
Translating:
A lot of people work with AWS, are making bank, and are terrified of their skill set being made obsolete.
They also have no idea what it means to use a dedicated server.
That’s why we get the same tired arguments and assumptions (such as the belief that bare-metal means “server room here in the office”) in every discussion.
I remember the day I discovered some companies, and not just tech ones (Walmart, UPS, Toyota,…) actually own, operate, and use their own datacenters.
And there companies out there specialized in planning and building datacenters for them.
I mean, it’s kind of obvious. But it made me realize at how small a scale I both thought and operated.
I worked for a company that was attempting to sell software to walmart.
About people who work with it, I'm just alluding to the famous quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".
- "I'm not calling anyone dumb."
- "I'm just alluding to the famous quote"
The bailey:
- "A lot of [Them] are making bank [and are] terrified of their skill set being made obsolete."
- "They have no idea what it means to use a dedicated server."
- "[They believe] bare-metal means “server room here in the office”"
FWIW, it definitely plays great: we all love to believe everyone who disagrees with us is ignorant, usually I'd upvote something like this and downvote a reply like mine, but this was so bad it hit an internal tripwire of "This is literally just a bunch of comments about They, where They is all the other comments."
You can easily play it off with "I didn't call other commenters DUMB, I just said they don't know a server is just a computer and they don't have to be in your office or in Amazon's data center to serve things!"
To riff on the famous quote you "just meant to allude to": "It is difficult to get an [interlocutor] to understand something [about their argumentation] when [they're playing to the crowd and being applauded]" I hope reading that gives you a sense of how strong of a contribution it is to discussion, as well as how well-founded it is, as well as what it implies.
And I stand by what I said: lots of people don't have experience with non-AWS setups and are going around repeating AWS salespeople cliches.
Is it the fact that you don't want to spend the time cooking? or is it cooking plus shopping plus cleaning up after?
Or is it counting the time to take cooking lessons? and including the cost of taking the bus to those cooking lessons?
Does the private chef even use your house, or their own kitchen? Or can you get a smaller house without a kitchen alltogether? Especially at the rate of kitchen improvement, where kitchens don't last 20 years anymore, you're gonna need a new kitchen every 5 years. (granted the analogy is starting to fail here, but you get my point)
Big companies have been terrible at managing costs and attributing value. At least with cloud the costs are somewhat clear. Also, finding staff that is skilled is a considerable expense for businesses with a more than a few pieces of code, and takes time, you can't just get them on a whim and get rid of them.
Yet every company I've worked for still used at least a bunch of AWS VPS exactly as they would have used dedicated servers, just for ten times the cost.