Do you think automation doesn't exist with on-prem? The vSphere terraform provider is very mature.

https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/vsphere/index.html

You can build your own machine images with packer, and actually have more control by building them from scratch (ISO) rather than being locked into a selection of base AMIs.

https://www.packer.io/docs/builders/vmware/

You can launch HA kubernetes clusters with cluster API. vSphere, openstack and even bare metal pxe all have providers

https://cluster-api.sigs.k8s.io/user/quick-start.html

Cloud native is not just for the public cloud!

> You can launch HA kubernetes clusters with cluster API. vSphere, openstack and even bare metal pxe all have providers

I've been looking for a decent solution for pxe and cluster-api. I've not pushed the button on any as I feel like they're all a little immature. Admittedly I've not had time to set up any in a test env yet. Any recommendations?

I'm not going to say that there aren't advantages, but when you start doing anything non-trivial with system configuration you'll find that the "infrastructure as code" approach also involves a large amount of work. Having done plenty of both in my career I don't think it's fair to say that IaC is at all less time consuming than traditional system administration. The advantages it comes with can also pretty easily come out to a wash if you don't plan around to some extent.

I guess what I'm saying is that, just like "cloud means cost savings" doesn't necessarily pan out, "cloud means time savings" also doesn't necessarily pan out. The best strategy continues to depend on your strengths, the application, etc.

You can do IaC for bare metal home servers as well. And thats coming from a 90s kid. We run a few physical servers for a college society with proxmox on top, and all of our VMs are codified in Ansible

I'm a Millennial as well but I started out on hardware.

You're not missing anything. There are still some use cases for on-prem hardware or for not building out on a single cloud provider but they're getting harder and harder to justify. The main use case I can see for running your own hardware is if you need massive egress. There comes a point where it can make sense to run it yourself, I luckily work at places with large enough margins to still leverage cloud solutions for this though.

Some guys don't know how to build things out on the cloud and are stuck in their way. When I was getting into the industry the old guys were still stuck on bare metal vs VMs. You should know how that went, most apps migrated to VMs no problem and a few apps stuck to bare metal for their own reasons.

A lot of small/mid size companies don't have the manpower to properly move an app to the cloud. Sometimes products/companies have enough steam to build an app and barely support it but not quite enough to keep it competitive and current. Basically, it can be easy to get a profitable company/app started with a couple amateurs building the product. It can get very expensive when you need professionals. A lot of places don't have the margins to support a robust team of professionals.

These companies don't always lack the foresight, sometimes it's impossible to get some breathing room to see the big picture or to get project funding instead of just upkeep funding. It can be expensive migrating something to AWS/Azure/etc and not just money but also manpower.

What kind of setup did you have for 5 servers at $50/mo on AWS? Interested to know - our EC2 instances that are about 1/4 as powerful as a laptop cost $60+/mo

Certainly nothing powerful :-) I can get away with t3.nano and t3.micro for what I'm doing at the moment. But the beauty of cloud, is that I can scale up when I eventually need it.

5x t3.nano will be ~$25/mo 5x t3.micro will be ~$50/mo

All of my AMIs are EBS optimized and require a minimum of 8GB for the root drive (Although they only use ~1.6GB. Not bothering to hack around this to save a buck.) So that'll be 40GB EBS block storage. Plus I want ~20GB spread across 3 of the machines.

So EBS should be ~$6/mo.

I only need the volumes of those last 3, the others are good to go with their base AMI or user-data init script. So I only need snapshot backups of ~20GB. Being priced incrementally and having minimal changes, I'll only be charged ~$1/mo for that + off-site another $1/mo

So, currently experimenting with the t3.nano - Cost is ~$36/mo. One of these servers will be used as a personal VPN, and I expect ~75GB/mo coming from my laptop. So bandwidth charges at $9/mo.

Total $45/mo - For what I have planned now, at least.

That's exactly the reason I gave up on AWS, I need an accountant to do the math every month :D

Now I rent a 4GB Linux box for 5$/m with no Dockers or whatsoever and happy that it just works

I also hate this complexity with a passion. I love cloud, but pricing can be a real nightmare.

I don't use AWS specifically but when I needed to know the price of some cloud service or group of services I spin up the service (or services) in a brand new project and let it run for 24 hours under similar working environment to see the impact, then after checking the results (the breakdown of each service's price in that day) I just close the project entirely, no left overs.

So I tend to successfully avoid these strange, terribly organized, cloud-specific, service-specific calculator where I can easily forget one aspect of the service that might cost a lot of money absolutely randomly.

Obviously it is a bad strategy if things are expected to reach $200/month and/or you do 'price evaluation' frequently, but otherwise it is stupid easy. I barely spent $50 each year doing this (small company and sporadic system changes)

But the best part is that the final daily price of your system is as precise as it can possibly be and that is worth something.

And if you went with reserved instances, what does it come out to? I guess that it is fair to assume that you will need at least this level of compute power for at least a year, right?

No idea. Generally reserved instances will give you 30-75% off though, I believe.

This is for a hobby project, so no way I'm committing to that, haha.

I'm also building the architecture so that I can easily completely destroy it and restore it from backups very quickly.

So, depending what I do with it, may be destroying it regularly and just bringing online when I want it.

Cool - I should give the micro instances another shot - I wonder how big of a Postgres database they will be able to handle.

If you have a small hobby project you could use AWS Lightsail[0] which has starting prices of $3.50/mo

https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/?opdp1=pricing

Thanks! Aware of Lightsail - But I'm experienced with AWS so have no trouble with, and prefer, the full feature set. I would've gone with Digital Ocean, otherwise.

Out of curiosity, what you're missing at Digital Ocean? It seems it has all the basics (VMs, managed DBs, storage, load balancers) and for a better price than the bigger clouds.

I find it quite easy to mix services from multiple providers. For example add SQS or S3 from Amazon and Elasticsearch from elastic.co if your cloud doesn't have the products. The latency kills mostly just the connection from a web app to its database.

The biggest drawback is multiple invoices, but I think it's manageable.

Consider bare metal at eg hetzner.de - they do everything that is hardware related, but still the cost is way lower than aws.

>Being able to spin up my entire infrastructure with Terraform, build out images with Packer, setup rules for off-site backups, ensure everything is secure to the level I want it, etc. - It takes me next to no time at all.

Interesting. For me, that equation is the opposite. Learning cloud technologies takes a long time. It depends a lot on what skillset you already have.