You're painting the picture as if AWS is the 2nd version of the IBM saying: "No one ever got fired for using AWS". This is simply not true...at least not the part where "IBM" (i.e. AWS now) is somehow inferior to the competition.

> If you are large enough to need to build your own datacenter instead of renting floorspace for pennies on the dollar from Switch or Equinix (although Equinix is kind of pricey) or Windstream or insert provider - then the datacenter is a rounding error in your 10-year IT budget.

Then you clearly don't understand the TCO of using a data center vs cloud. The datacenter cost itself isn't the cost - the people who operate it are.

On a computing resource basis can you operate SQL Server on a rack in Equinix for cheaper than that in AWS? Sure, but who is going to pay for the person to patch it every week, or upgrade it to the latest version, or upgrade the SAN disk, or upgrade the hardware every 3 years, etc. etc. Let's take this a step further - who is going to hire these people? And fire them? And train them? These are all transactions costs that get hidden in the "$0.20/hr cost" of spinning up an EC2 instance.

If you think cloud computing it's just about a lift and shift from a traditional data center, then you don't understand how to calculate TCO.

P.S. - For the record, many large internal IT groups do in fact do simple lift and shifts from traditional data centers and don't fully realize the value of cloud computing resources. However, these companies will usually mature eventually and evolve services to ones that are more advantageous (i.e. setup SQL Server on EC2 and the migrate to RDS). AWS (et al) have the ability to do this with ease.

I've seen this "even a lift-and-shift reduces TCO" argument before, but it only ever works if you pretend that AWS lives up to its zero-management hype. Maybe, for someone, it does. Not for any deployment I've seen. This never prevents management from pretending, of course.

EDIT: ah, I've seen that the argument has retreated to "it reduces IT headcount." Again, maybe for someone, but I have yet to see it actually work, and every time management has just hustled the TCO calculation.

Who is saying zero-management? If you have a consultant lying to you, that's not a cloud problem and I've heard the same people lie about all kinds of on-premise services as well.

What I've heard the major cloud providers say is true: you need _less_ staff and you can spend time on different things, which has been generally true. For example, instead of needing to configure a bunch of network hardware (which is a distinct skill you need to hire) you can have a general devops person use Terraform to manage routes, firewall rules, etc. without also needing to be a Cisco expert and spending time operating the underlying hardware.

The key question to ask is where your infrastructure was to start with. If you have an A-grade ops team, a lift-and-shift will probably not be much of a cost savings because you presumably already have economies of scale working in your favor, unless you have enough bursty workloads to pay for it that way. The catch is that most places do not have that high-end ops capacity so what you're really doing is taking your limited IT capacity and reclaiming the time which is currently going into things like managing Dell firmware updates.

Sure, but you can go from "I have 5 people managing my 150 instances of SQL Server" to "I have 1 AWS sys admin". The point wasn't that the costs are eliminated, it's that they are baked in.

I think Cloud still costs more overall, never been convinced it actually saves money. I do think it tends to increase developer velocity though, and that can be worth it.

This is especially true for more than basic services. If all you need is a bunch of Linux servers, sure, you can find people who will keep them patched for you without too much trouble (although it'll almost certainly turn that “rounding error” into a serious number) but once you start building things which are higher level with legitimately hard problems to solve and need to have good solutions for all of the monitoring, security, ops, etc. needs that staffing becomes harder and you're going to have to sell your executives on the idea that the best use of your expensive A-team is cloning S3, Lambda, etc. when you can get that benefit immediately without a massive up-front payment and have the same people working on a strategic benefit.

No need to clone; all of this already exists. Take a look at CNCF.

* Kubernetes

* High-level storage services: Ceph, Cassandra, NFS

* Lower-level storage for whatever you pick for the previous point

Each of those, and the combined service you build, needs staffing for operations, monitoring, security, etc. support. If you follow any security standards or are in a regulated industry, you're on the hook for documenting compliance on all of those, too, especially if you need to be able to demonstrate things like immutability.

You certainly can do this but that's a number of full-time jobs requiring expertise. If you have enough storage usage you can potentially justify the savings over the rates you'd be able to negotiate but that's a big up-front cost which you hope but are not guaranteed to recoup.

I took your previous comment to be about on-prem cloud technology. It exists and does not need to be "cloned". If you were taking about staffing resources, we've pretty well established you're going to need staffing to manage both cloud and on-prem tech.

You need to document whether it's on-prem or in the cloud.

If you buy storage by the petabyte or use a large enough amount of network egress, you can definitely make that money back but it's a major commitment.

Agree, I don't think anyone is buying SANs that don't need them. If you're spending 7 figures on your AWS bill, you should be looking into other options.

That is building an S3 replacement. You aren't writing every line of code personally but you are selecting components, configuring them, operating the service, and testing it, which is a major commitment. Simply running k8s at an equivalent level is a non-trivial commitment.

> Agree, I don't think anyone is buying SANs that don't need them. If you're spending 7 figures on your AWS bill, you should be looking into other options.

Note that the 7 figure commitment I mentioned was what you'd need to build an S3 equivalent. Simply having 24x7 staffing and hardware easily puts you in that range.

You're casting this as a much more complicated concept than it is. It is essentially the same old "build vs buy" argument. No, it does not make sense to manage a datacenter to run a single wordpress blog, nor does it make sense for a telco to run their infra on top of a public cloud. These are all truisms.

My point stands that if you have a seven-figure AWS bill, you already have plenty of associated staffing costs. Once you hit the break-even point between the two, you can decide whether you want to continue to pay linearly, or go down the path of increasing RoI.

Who cares? This is IT and is not relevant. And they have Brent and he will solve everything.

You're implicitly arguing that NoOps is not only a functional model, but also scalable and much less costly than having a {Dev|Sec}Ops staff. The last time this was publicly debated between Adrian Cockcroft and John Allspaw, it was immediately obvious to everyone that there is no such thing as NoOps. You can have developers support their own apps in production on the cloud, but that takes away time from developers and comes with its own set of downsides (most prominently, a disinterest in what they consider mundane or boring). Once your developers are spending, in aggregate, more than 40 hours a week do ops work, you'll gain efficiency by hiring a DevOps Engineer whose entire career focus is all the things developers aren't typically great at. I've seen this in-person as an employee at medium, large, and a Fortune 50 business. I haven't yet seen a single app, not even serverless, that requires zero maintenance. I have also seen highly-distributed, performant apps run on cheap hardware with no SAN or VMware to drive up the cost and complexity. That same app, made up of mostly microservices, was much more expensive to run on on the cloud.

You might want to stop throwing around terms like TCO when you also clearly don't understand how to calculate it.

I'm starting to be of the mindset that us-east-1 is already "Too Big To Fail". I guarantee you that conversations are being had in boardrooms right now about how to reduce dependency on that region, if not AWS entirely.

If you're not blasting your AWS account manager and asking what their plans are to avoid this happening in the future, then your CTO is not doing their job.

If AWS itself is not internally working out how to "get off us-east-1" for its global services, then it is failing in its role as infra provider.

AWS has a lot of stuff about how to make your infra redundant and resilient to failure, in their environment, mostly about replicating across AZs and then across regions.

The fact that their "global" services are not actually "global" but are "everything goes to us-east-1" is broken and if they're not fixing it, then that is when you start looking at other alternatives.

I'm not. You implied too much.

> You might want to stop throwing around terms like TCO when you also clearly don't understand how to calculate it.

I do. I never said that people were completely eliminated (see one of my child comments). Everything you implied was that "well devs are doing the effort and that doesn't get calculated". That wasn't my argument - you just added that nuance as a retort.

> I guarantee you that conversations are being had in boardrooms right now about how to reduce dependency on that region, if not AWS entirely.

I guarantee you they are not. Also, how many data center providers let you simply spin up your whole environment into another region, point n click, and complete it in hours?

Source - work with 100+ companies with PE folks that sit on boards.

I'm speaking from firsthand knowledge. How embarrassing for you to think that because you know some Private Equity folks (generally the worst people at managing technology), that 100% of the rest of the world is doing (or not doing) exactly what they're doing.

You wrote paragraphs about how expensive it is to hire people to do stuff in a datacenter. What is your argument, if it is not that this is more costly than outsourcing it?

This entire debate should be recast the simple "build vs buy" concept that it already is.

So am I. My reference to PE firms was that my anecdote of the few boards I'm on is supplemented by their experience.

> This entire debate should be recast the simple "build vs buy" concept that it already is.

Because that's entirely the premise of my argument. Did you read the parent comment and what I was responding to?

PS - Say what you want about PE folk, but they are the most ruthless capitalists. So IMHO they are far more incentivized to drive cost efficiencies than anyone else because profit = EBITDA = valuations.

I guess I find that a bit humorous. I've been architecting solutions that span on-premises and cloud for nearly a decade so I'm intimately familiar with both. I don't actually have a horse in the race. You want cloud, buy cloud, you want on-prem, buy on-prem. But the marketing about one-size-fits-all is EXTREMELY tiresome. And the idea that every single business can or should be moving their entire infrastructure to the cloud is as well.

The fact you imply that somehow you don't need people to manage the cloud makes me seriously question what at-scale deployments you've been a part of. I have yet to see a single enterprise customer save money on staff by moving to the cloud. More often than not what they end up doing is laying off the "tape jockey" and replacing him with an SRE who costs 3x the salary. Congratulations? Now you're paying more for an SRE, and you're backing up to S3 at about 5x the cost of what you were spending on tape? But I guess the 7 years of backups you're legally obligated to keep are more agile?

>If you think cloud computing it's just about a lift and shift from a traditional data center, then you don't understand how to calculate TCO.

I don't think the concept of cloud computing is lift and shift and never said it was. But that's not really relevant to OP's question, what is relevant is what's happening on the ground.

What's actually happening is that most established businesses "moving to the cloud" are lifting and shifting and finding out the hard way. I'm not saying that's what they should do, I'm not saying that's at all a good idea, I'm telling you that is what is happening. And if you think "well they'll mature into a more cloud friendly model" - you're as delusional as their management. What ACTUALLY happens is after they lift and shift and get a year's worth of those bills, they lift and shift the stuff that never should've been in the cloud in the first place back on-premises. Hopefully by that point they've learned their lesson and have a thoughtful evaluation of their applications: re-home, re-write, leave in place.

100% agree. Didn't mean to imply this. As with anything....it depends.

Another thing is costs of building something new. In the old world it would mean doing the math on resource needs now and in the future, since adding Hw meant capital expenditure. No such problem now and its easier to get started, see if it works, and scale or kill early.

And of course as others have mentioned, keeping it all running requires expensive expertise. Esp. now with the internet that looks like automated wild west. You cant release a service without it being auto-probed and auto-attacked within 2-3hrs.

Nope. With the cloud, the costs have went down for any large coMpany, even those that just moved the old crap to VMs running on someone elses hw.

I think I found your problem...

Are you implying that there isn't idle cloud hardware?

Most data center machines run at a tiny fraction of their capabilities; seeing a CPU running at 25% is definitely something that stands out. Because of this, cloud operators can oversubscribe these machines in various ways, packing workloads of multiple tenants onto a single box while a single-tenant bespoke DC can't. They can also do things that schedule DC-wide resources (namely power) in ways that renting space in a colo cannot; they can shed load in insightful ways when a power overtopping event happens that can minimize the impact (e.g. throttle / nuke VMs that can operate in a degraded mode before impacting other critical services). No hetergeneous, multiple-private tenant DC is going to oversubscribe their rack- or row-level power delivery to tenants and require them to hook in to a smart system to manage overtopping events; they just won't trust their tenants to do the right thing, as they have no power over the tenants' machines and power draws; the cloud providers do.

At the end of the day, the economies of scale are just hard to beat, in terms of COGS.

The real question is whether they'll pass the savings from this on to the customers or the shareholders' dividends, and so far it seems like it is the latter.

Kubernetes fixes that, as does VMware. They can both distribute workloads efficiently to ensure good utilization. VMware has done that for 20 years.

Are you familiar with VMware?

Compute on preemptable VMs/spot instances is cheaper in cloud.

Object storage, if you would have required a vendor support contract on prem, up to a PB or so.

managed kubernetes, if you would have required a vendor support contract on prem.

I know there are also a bunch of requirements for where you can store user data these days due to privacy regulations.

I entirely associate fantasy football with working hours. Ditto a variety of other kinds of sports betting. Like, I know people do these at home, too, but there's a lot of it happening during business hours, at offices.

Money is ALWAYS the issue. Whether you can pass along increased cost to your customers or not is entirely dependent on what your business is and the competitive landscape of it. I don't care how "agile" the cloud makes you, if your cost of IT is more expensive than the revenue you bring in, you're bankrupt. It's the running joke around here about people who build autoscaling k8s based infrastructure for a site that could be hosted on a $5/month VPS with even a little bit of tuning and caching. Complexity for the sake of complexity is called stupidity unless you're doing it as part of an educational experience. Going to production with needless complexity is a great way to ruin a good idea.

>Cost is not the same as value.

I guess it's a good thing I didn't state that cost is the same thing as value?

With operating your own DC, you have to hire really great people and hope they don’t fuck up. You have to plan much in advance for capacity changes. It’s very much possible that something goes wrong in your compute infrastructure and simply nobody in your team has the expertise to fix it. Put it another way: can you pay/hire the same kinds of engineers that work at AWS/GCP? If not, cloud is the safer route. Cost does matter, and this is why companies sign multi year contracts to get discounts. But business continuity is critical.

But if you need a server then (in most companies big and small) it's far easier to spin up a VPS in the cloud than deal with internal IT.

> "I didn't state that cost is the same thing as value?"

You're arguing over cost, but the cloud is often much greater value compared to traditional IT. Spending 2x for 5x more value is a valid decision. If it doesn't work in your situation then don't do it, but it's not the same answer for everyone.

I think the goal is that it should be the same amount of engineering time to set up both options, and both should cost $5 per month.

Today, that is broadly untrue. Although a few niches like appengine offer this.

Money is COMPLICATED and THE issue.

Money is complicated because you have income and expenses. Time to market and velocity can help you get more income. This needs to be balanced by expenses.

When you're growing or your needs are uncertain than a hyperscaler can help you get moving quickly. This aids in time to market. But, you do this at a cost. Hyperscalers cost more than running it all yourself.

If your workloads are steady state or changing at a predictable rate than it can be cost effective to run your own infrastructure.

There are other elements to all of this such as global location of hardware compared compared to end users.

Money is the issue because companies are in business to make money. Sometimes companies take a loss now in order to make money later but it's always about the money.