Having all that "best practice" service is great if it works well, but when it becomes a checkbox on the purchase order then it can cause far more problems than it solves.

I have found that a lot of the push to outsource hosting is simply an attempt to deflect responsibility for problems rather than in expectation of actually providing more reliability.

For every company or startup that thinks they need 100% uptime the reality is that they can not only get away with much less but in practice will end up with much less anyway because the effort and moving parts (load balancing, distributed database, etc) will typically result in something failing anyway even if the underlying hardware is indeed 100% up, and somewhat surprisingly to quite a bit of people here, manage to survive and thrive despite that (the recent AWS outages took out a lot of services and products and they still seem to be around somehow).

Ugh. I hate that phrase. The translation into plain English is almost always "What I read in some blog" or "Because I want to" or "It's what our sales rep told us." Even from C-levels who should know better.

Yes.

The opposite is also true though: Imagine not wanting to pay for that and needing it!

There's a reason why most homes connect to the power utility companies. Yes, we can run generators ourselves. Does it make sense to do that? Not usually.

Same thing with this server. If it makes sense for your use-case, outstanding. In many cases, people are better off offloading this to another company and focusing on their strengths.

The minute gens/solar/wind/batteries combo becomes less expensive than public utility I'll switch. For now it makes no financial sense.

With the clouds it is the other way around. My dedicated servers running my software kick the shit out of AWS performance wise for a fraction of the price. And no I do not spend my days "managing" it. I can order new dedicated server and the same shell script will reinstall all prerequisites, restore data from backup and run it in few minutes add (however long it takes to import database from backup). Where needed I also have standby up to date servers.

Other than running this script to test restoration once a month my management overhead is zero.

See... anyone can pick <random thing>, and describe how people don't do it. Of course, you cite a generator, others use solar cells, right?

Looks like sensible/nonsensical based on who you are and what are your needs. Not everybody needs cloud, not everybody can self host.

And that's fine. People should make choices like that. I was objecting to saying people paid X for RDS and others paid Y for one bare metal server. Those are not in the same category, there's no point comparing those prices without a lot more information.

I don't care where those snapshots are stored and how much space those take. In case I need to restore my IaaS provider gives me 2-click option to restore - one to click restore and 2nd to confirm. I sit and watch progress. I also don't care about hardware replacement and anything that connects to that. I have to do VPS OS updates but that is it.

I do my own data backups on different VPS of course just in case my provider has some issue, but from convenience perspective that IaaS solution is delivering more than I would ask for.

But of course I am running build tools and bunch of other dev tools locally that are not even installed on our servers.

But in all reality, laptops are really, really powerful these days.

My laptop at the moment is a HPE something ... HP 250 G6 Notebook PC according to dmidecode. I used to have a five year old Dell 17" i7 based beast but it ... broke. I whipped out the SSD, shrank the root fs a bit (with gparted) and used a clonezilla disc and an external USB link to get my system onto a Samsung EVO M.2 thingie from the SSD. This laptop was an employee cast off/

As is probably apparent from the above, I use Linux. I have some decent apps at my disposal but in general I don't need much hardware. Decent: RAM >= 8GB and SSD storage are key. I don't play games much. I've always specified 17" screens in the past for my laptops but now I have to use a 15" jobbie, that's becoming less of a hard requirement.

I am a Managing Director (small business - IT consultancy) but I do spend rather a lot of my time doing sysadmin and network admin stuff. I also do business apps. I once wrote a Finite Capacity Plan for a factory in Excel with rather a lot of VBA. Before you take the piss, bear in mind I used the term finite and not infinite. That meant that quite a few people had employment in Plymouth (Devon not MA) in the 1990s. I won't bore you with my more modern failures 8)

Anyway as you say, modern laptops are phenomenally powerful. Mine have wobbly windows 8) I can't be arsed with MS Windows anymore for my own gear - it gets in the way. Me and the wife said goodbye at Windows 7.

They tend to be the things that you don't need until you absolutely need them right now (or yesterday).

It’s easy to trivialize $20-30k a month when it’s someone else’s money and it’s less work for you.

People on my time would rather be developing software than doing sys admin stuff

I use AWS, DO and Hetzner (bare metal) for (different) cases where each makes sense.

In the past few years, maintenance burden and uptime between AWS and Hetzner hosted stuff was comparable, with the cost being an order of magnitude less for Hetzner (as an added benefit, that machine is more beefy but I wasn't even comparing that).

> People on my time would rather be developing software than doing sys admin stuff.

I am not surprised software developers would prefer doing software development :-)

No, they often don’t understand the alternatives available because the wolves are guarding the henhouse (software devs who don’t want to work with the pace of on-prem IT).

> People on my time would rather be developing software than doing sys admin stuff

No shit, that’s why software devs aren’t sysadmins.