People leave for all sorts of reasons: Moving for family reasons, becoming stay-at-home parents, moving for a spouse's job, retiring, starting their own companies, or even just getting bored and wanting to do something different. Or it could be as simple as getting promoted to a different role.
It's unrealistic to make engineering decisions with the assumption that the same engineers will be around and stuck on the same project forever.
Like the OP said: Every hour they have to spend working on the colocation setup is an hour they aren't spending on your company's competitive advantage, so you have to hire more engineers (and more managers) to compensate.
> If a company can't hire datacenter techs...
How many techs do you think you need for reasonable on-call coverage? 3? 6? Add a manager in the mix because you need someone to manage them.
The costs add up quickly.
It's weird to see people championing colocation as a cost saver and then pivoting to arguments that you just need to hire more engineers and techs and manage them.
Employees are expensive. One of the primary benefits of cloud is that you don't have to hire and manage all of these employees to do all of these things at the colo.
I can’t remember the last time I took a call outside of office hours, and even in hours it’s very rare. There’s enough resilience built in that any issues can wait until morning
The last major outage was in 2017, before we had a third member of the team. I was on the other side of the world installing a new system, the other was on leave. We had a network issue, OSPF melted and knocked out some services, we were down for about half an hour as I rebooted the core switch pair remotely.
(We’ve since redesigned so that doesn’t happen)
We get paid nowhere near six figures either.
Sure you can be ridiculous, I remember one team I worked on that employed a full time unix contractor (on 3 times the staff wage) to look after 6 servers and deploy a tar ball every few months. I replaced him with a small shell script. Another was a DBA looking after a small oracle database (oracle - which of course is that generations “just use amazon”)
And then basic other things like having remote smart hands ready to go, and common failure items like fans, power supplies, fan trays, hard drives pre-positioned and ready to swap in. With MOPs for swapping them. Stocks of basic things like fiber patch cables, commonly used transceivers, copper patch cables, stored in every cage.
Or we have seen all of this and that's exactly why we don't want it.
Building a company is hard enough. Adding the overhead of developing, maintaining, recruiting for, and staffing our own datacenter is madness when I can click a few buttons and get the same thing from a cloud provider without hiring anyone extra to manage the datacenter.
No one is denying that a proper data center management system can exist. We all know it can exist.
The issue is that it's a huge distraction with a lot of potential pitfalls. Your network infrastructure with Cradlepoint LTE radios in the colocation cages sounds great after it works, gets set up, stays documented, and all the bugs have been ironed out. But that's a lot of hidden work that could have been allocated to launching the product faster.
If the use case is somebody developing a software product that is a totally other scenario.
“Building a company is hard enough, adding the overhead of actually building a company is madness”
> But that's a lot of hidden work that could have been allocated to launching the product faster.
The topic of this thread isn't about a brand new start-up with no resources trying to build their product as much as possible, it's about a company that spends millions in cloud invoices.
Building a company using AWS, totally legit. Scaling this usage up to millions of dollars because you don't want to manage the hassle, fair enough it's your money, I don't mind if all your profit goes to Amazon really…
One big pain that no one seems to mention are the mundane details that come with running your own DC. Even in our fairly small operation we had half of a person dedicated to maintaining the warranties on the hardware, sourcing replacement hard drives for 10yo servers, disposing of retired hardware, purchasing new hardware, etc.
These things take a huge amount of focus and don't contribute to your product at all. The "cloud" has removed all of this busywork and I wouldn't go back to the old way for almost any amount of money.
People move to the cloud to escape their company’s IT process… there might be some unicorn company out there that does infrastructure “right” but I’ve yet to work there.
Humans are incredibly expensive and notoriously unreliable when compared against “machines”; or in this case an API.
It’s usually worth paying 2-3x the cost to have someone else manage something for you with a given SLA, because that’s what it will end up being when you decide to bring it in house when you take into account the time and effort needed as well.
A “good” & “reliable” Systems Engineering team, that can offer 24/7 support will take around a year to hire and setup, and they need roughly the same amount of time to transition you off AWS in to your system. They probably need closer to 3-5yrs to give the same level of documentation, API’s, tooling, processes, UI’s and training that AWS already provides.
Let’s call it 5 years to get to the level of AWS when you started the transition.
A decent team of 5-7, including engineers + PO/PM + UX and so forth, is at least $1.5M/yr. That’s $7.5M over 5 years, not including your new hardware and networking costs. Let’s call it $10M. You’re also 5 years behind AWS now, and over that transition you’re still paying AWS, and your development speed has halved as you wait for your new team to build or transition infrastructure.
You can trade cost and quality for speed and have everything ready in 2-3 years by setting up a few teams. Add HR support, more contractors etc etc. you’re looking at a $10M+ outlay again, regardless.
Or you can keep paying AWS $5M/yr, renegotiate fees often and literally not worry about that headache and focus on your product.
> They probably need closer to 3-5yrs to give the same level of documentation, API’s, tooling, processes, UI’s and training that AWS already provides.
You don't need to build an internal AWS to manage your own servers.
For a growing company I would always weigh the organizational overhead of moving on-prem to the actual cloud costs. If your goal is in the next year to grow revenue from 50MM to 100MM, then a company wide engineering effort to move to bespoke platform to save 5-10MM just isn't a good use of time (keep in mind you are trying to hire and release new features).
It's not that it's impossible; it's that trying to both scale up your business and provide infrastructure to yourself is just unnecessarily increasing the difficulty on your businesses execution.
* https://liveramp.com/developers/blog/google-cloud-platform-g... * https://liveramp.com/developers/blog/migrating-a-big-data-en...
One big point was challenges of maintaining multiple colocation sites, with cross replication, for disaster recovery. Since Hadoop triple replicates all data within one DC, this requires 6 times the disk storage capacity of data size for dual DCs. In contrast, cloud object storage pricing includes replication within a region with very high availability such that storing once in cloud storage may be acceptable. Further, you also need double the compute, with one of the DCs always standing by should the other fail.
*) https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r2.8.0/hadoop-project-dist/ha...
Probably some learning pains but at least i don't have to "lose" half my storage because the sizes aren't paired with anything.
Everything above really sounds like it's just regurgitating AWS sales person talking points.
Sounds like a systemic management / CTO-level problem to me if a company isn't willing to put in place the hiring practices and compensation, documentation systems and operational procedures to deal with that sort of concern.
If your core engineering staff is turning over multiple times for arbitrary reasons you have other problems to deal with.
> Engineers can't set up, maintain, and do on-call for the colocated setup without subtracting from their primary working hours.
If a company can't hire datacenter techs to install hardware, cables, and swap hardware as smart remote hands, maintaining as little as a couple of 45RU cabinets of gear, you also have other management/systemic problems to deal with. I'm looking at this from the point of view of a facilities based bare metal ISP that owns/runs all of its own hardware, and can tell you it's not rocket science.