I do most of my work in large enterprises and there is definitely a point when you hit a complexity cliff managing your own systems. No one system causes this (major systems can often support a dedicated staff), but it looks like death by a thousand cuts when the HR interview system goes down after 7 years and no one is certain how to deal with its VMs/hardware/networking.
I have to say, you're completely overlooking why AWS/GCP/Azure are good services in your answer. The value add from using these services is that you don't have to know how to run any of these things, building an SRE/devops/sysadmin organization is non trivial for a team of developers with a background in application development. Spending an extra 100k a year on AWS is likely cheaper than the cost of building out a team to do all of these things for you, including as things scale.
If you're going to have a team of people deploying all of your own middleware software anyways on VMs, that completely defeats the cost savings from using cloud these days. It's much more of a PaaS business than a pure IaaS one.
I eagerly await CaaS (Cloud as a Service) so VPC, EC2 and EFS planning and deployment is automated.
Re:Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel
by castlecrasher2 on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @09:30AM
(#18655481)
I also haven't done baremetal server management, but my first concern with your first line is what do you do when as your services expand as does your dev team and the org needs more processes like log management, data warehousing, analytics, or whatever else AWS offers?
I'll admit this isn't always true (looking at you, Neptune) but I find AWS' key strength is the huge community, so most of its services have 1) decent documentation and 2) many users to refer to with technical questions as well as filling out roles.
Re:Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel
by IOT_Apprentice on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @10:48AM
(#18656069)
buy as in own? Or rent monthly?
There is a little extra upfront cost to set these things up, but once you have it, it's fine. You can do your zfs snapshots to hetzners backup infrastructure.
A lot of people try to throw all their stuff on kubernetes, for that you can buy a few machines and provision them with ansible.
It's not like AWS devops engineers are the cheapest of all engineers, so there are a couple of solutions, which are mostly cheaper than their cloud alternatives.
Contrary to the parent I actually don't recommend going that route, mostly because I want to deliver a project and then have them be able to manage it on their own. E.g. an ECS cluster is simple to manage and maintain IMHO. I do tell them about the options that they have and them decide though.