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Comment by wink | Hacker News Reader

Every team I have worked on so far, if using AWS you had 50-100% of the developers with the knowledge and credentials (and usually the confidence) to troubleshoot/just fix it/replace it.

Every team with dedicated hardware in a data center it was generally 1-2 people who would have fixed stuff quickly, no matter the size of the company (small ones, of course - so 10-50 devs). And that's with available replacement hardware.

I'm not even one of the "cloud is so great" people - but it you're generally doing software it's actually a lot less friction.

And while the ratio of cost difference may sound bad, it's generally not. Unless we're talkign huge scale, you can buy a lot of AWS crap for the yearly salary of a single person.

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You said developers have the knowledge and credentials (and thus the work) of managing your infra, and a moment later basically asserted you're saving money on the salary for the sysadmin. This is the actual lie you got sold on.

AWS isn't going to help you setup your security, you have to do it yourself. Previously a sysadmin would do this, now it's the devs. They aren't going to monitor your database performance. Previously a sysadmin would do this, now it's the devs. They aren't going to setup your networking. Previously a sysadmin would do this, ...

Managing hardware and updating hosts is maybe 10% of the work of a sysadmin. You can't buy much on 1/10th of a sysadmins salary, and even the things you can, the quality and response time are generally going to be shit compared to someone who cares about your company (been there).

Yes, please continue explaining the job I did in the past to me.

It doesn't change anything, especially as I did not blatantly argue cloud=good,hardware=bad. That is a completely different question.

My point is that given some circumstances, you need a lot less specialized deep knowledge if all your software just works[tm] on a certain level of the stack upwards. Everyone knows the top 1/3 of the stack and you pay for the bottom 2/3 part.

I didn't mean to say "let's replace a sysadmin with some AWS stuff", my point was "100k per year on AWS makes a lot of small companies run".

Also my experience was with having hardware in several DCs around the world, and we did not have people there (small company, but present in at least 4 countries) - so we had to pay for remote hands and the experience was mostly bad . Maybe my bosses chose bad DCs, or maybe I'd trust sysadmins at "product companies" more than those working as remote hands at a hoster...

> Every team I have worked on so far, if using AWS you had 50-100% of the developers with the knowledge and credentials (and usually the confidence) to troubleshoot/just fix it/replace it.

is that because they were using AWS so hired people who knew AWS?

I would personally have far more confidence in my ability to troubleshoot or redeploy a dedicated server than the AWS services to replace it.

> Every team with dedicated hardware in a data center it was generally 1-2 people who would have fixed stuff quickly, no matter the size of the company (small ones, of course - so 10-50 devs). And that's with available replacement hardware.

There are lots of options for renting dedicated hardware, that the service provider will maintain,. Its still far cheaper than AWS. Even if you have redundancy for everything its still a lot cheaper.

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