I am not against the cloud. VMs are also cloud, unless you run them on your own servers. For instance, the Hetzner Cloud (mostly VMs, plus load balancers and disks) is so cheap and has such a nice CLI API that it competes aggressively with dedicated servers - I would definitely start any with VMs, not with iron.

The biggest problem is the so called cloud native stuff which is both more expensive and more complex. There are contexts where it makes sense but for startups they are doing more harm than good.

Thing is, by the time the cloud native stuff makes sense most companies are at a scale where it'd be cheaper to just hire a good devops team, and start building your own cloud infra on own hardware.

Probably so. And that would be likely my approach at such scale.

Still, my most benevolent interpretation of current reality is, rather than saying "that cloud native stuff is crap", accepting that there are cases where it may make sense.

For instance, large companies might have trouble hiring a good ops team because they have in general trouble hiring and retaining talent (another conversation topic).

Ops people are a scarce good because univs do not train people for that and most people prefer coding. I am leaving the work devops out because the market completely perverted its meaning.

(my take on the devops funeral: https://logical.li/blog/devops/ )

Reference:

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#developer-profile-deve...

Only around 11% of the whole devs identify as devops specialist or cloud infrastructure engineer.

This is why I am saying ops people are a scarce good (unfortunately) from a data driven perspective. Of course my daily life confirms it.

Most of my money comes from companies unable to handle even simple setups - and having trouble to find the right people, so I somewhat agree too. But it's mainly an education problem - it's pretty much impossible to find good people with that skillset, but it is possible to find people straight out of University willing to learn.

I fully agree with you: it is mostly an education problem and you can find people willing to learn right out of univ. Indeed, that is exactly my experience: I successfully onboarded several (carefully selected) junior people into the ops skillset over the years and I have seen them do wonders with customer systems, while enjoying their "ops life", without having fires every day.

The connection of this to the replies above it: I am not sure if this kind of junior people would be easy to retain in a large corporate environment. We certainly can do that in niche consulting.

We're a tiny company doing ops as services for large corporations - with one customer now coming close to a decade. That solves the retaining problem as we have limited exposure to all that big corporation nonsense, and have the option for individuals to go on a vacation in other projects without losing their knowledge in the organisation.

I had the exact same business for 18 years :-) and yes, without corporate nonsense it is easy to retain intelligent people. Cheers

And somehow I feel these cloud native services keep breaking. Again Azure Container Instances found a interesting new way to fail. I have to check on Monday is it still in booting itself more often than usual(dev environment so have not tried any fixes)...

While the VMs that run some parts of the system have been rock solid giving zero issues... Should have just thrown the stuff on one of them or added third one. Cost would have been same.