That might get you one admin (we office workers have a mistaken belief that our salary is most of our cost. It's somewhere just north of half.).

What do you do when they're on vacation/sick/sleeping?

Thing is, I really want us to host our own stuff. For one thing if you don't host anything you lose all competence and then you really are beholden to your cloud provider.

But it seems to be that we are in this situation until someone figures out how to comodify servers - and server orchestration - to the point where this stuff gets cheaper to manage again.

This pendulum always swings. No sooner will we control our own hardware again than someone will come up with a new way to centralize it.

Totally, the thing that's super cool about the amazon instances you don't have to do anything with users, authentication, authorization, networking, dns, backups, monitoring, logging, firewall rules, security patches and upgrades.

With a bare metal server you have to manage all of that.

Oh my goodness man, have you managed Amazon instances? Setting up VPCs, IGW, IAM, DNS, EBS Snapshots (and deletions until recent lifecycle), custom metric in coudwatch, and Security Groups is a seriously challenging task just to learn the basics, much less do it right, much less automate it.

It's not a bed of roses in the physical world either, but you're simply wrong to say it's easy in the "Cloud" and hard in a DC/Bare Metal.

(it was a joke.) There are a zillion things to think about if you're going to have even one machine public on the internet, regardless of the hosting solution. At a small organization there's always that one programmer that's like half sysadmin.

I find it amusing that people pretend without bare metal, you'll get all of that person's time back.

I missed it. Thanks.