Learning/Administering AWS/GCP/Azure costs time and therefore money too. Maybe less money, maybe more money than doing things yourself, depending on what you're doing. But you shouldn't disregard such costs.

I've seen enough buddies spending enormous amounts of time doing AWS devops on top of paying the AWS premium when they could have gotten away easily with a less than a handful of VPS (+ optionally $100/month worth of cloudflare as a CDN).

Once an organization reaches a certain size it will need one, who ideally should be a person that can wear the dual hats of linux/bsd sysadmin and also network engineer.

If the person is already on payroll doing a number of other duties, the time/effort to set up such an environment as described in the post could be as short as a couple of days work.

Yeah, but the absence of system administrator has just cost these guys 72k for several hours.

I'm just trying to explain that server cost is more than just the hardware.

In most cases cloud computing is actually still a very cost effective solution to infrastructure. But with infinite scalability also comes responsibility.

In the case of the OP, had they had their own hardware they would have noticed that had written bad code (it would have crashed or become very slow at least), but the cloud just scaled up and processed their code.

I'm not trying to defend Google in this case. Billing 72k when a 100 USD limit is set sounds like a scam.

Why full-time? It's possible to outsource IT administration to a local IT company and pay only for set-up and maintenance that is needed. Way less than 72k a year for many use cases.

Also, companies that employ bunch of developers can find a developer that has IT administration expertise and allocate some of his time to this. Still cheaper than 72k a year or employing someone full-time, if IT requirements don't call for full time job.

It's not just cloud vs full-time.

Exactly. Or just buy a managed dedicated server - it's more expensive, but still it's a fraction of the full time sysadmin cost, and much cheaper than AWS.

Aha what ? Where I live (Bordeaux, France) a quick glance through the job offers for full-time sysadmin are between 25 and 35k€ / year

You confuse cost with salary.

Someone who makes 35k a year costs much more. Think about office space, training, insurance, payroll costs etc.

35k is the gross which encompasses a big part of that except office space.

No it's not. In France companies pay ~1.5-2x gross salary in total, gross going to the employee ( some of it getting deducted by the state), rest going for health insurance, taxes, etc.

If you check the actual numbers here - https://entreprise.pole-emploi.fr/cout-salarie/ you'll see that for e.g. 30k€ gross yearly, a company shells out 41k, which is definitely not 1.5-2x total and still very far from the 75k mentioned above

sysadmin isn't infrastructure engineer nor SRE. The salaries for latter are way above 74k/year

France seems to pay IT quite bad. In Germany nobody would work for this in metro area.

Jesus no wonder many IT professionals in europe want to come here.

You can get 2x more in Poland.

And for half the use cases you still need one. Unless you go full SaaS (which may or may not be an option depending what you are doing, and what's on offer in that field), you still get stuff which needs to be administered, updated, patched, etc. Maybe not the OS layer (or maybe even that), maybe not the DB (but then it might cost more), but you're not getting away from that.

You only really start saving at some scale (get a small core of cloud-literate admins, and now you can have them run thousands of systems for effectively no incremental cost)

Which is moot if you're just going to burn the 72k by shooting yourself in the foot.

And the way these cloud services go, the 72k was only detected because it was an one-off event. Turn that into a base-level inefficiency that costs that over a year and what have you then.

I wonder what a full time cloud engineer costs. IMO it’s trading a simple system for a complex system, so now the maintainers cost even more than sysadmins used to.