[bird_monster]

> And diving into complicated cloud infrastructure with a small business, if you're not already an expert on it, is a very uncertain endeavour in terms of whether you'll get everything set up right

I do not agree. The entire point of using cloud offerings as opposed to rolling your own, is cloud offerings are usually several orders of magnitude easier to configure. Using Event Hub, as an example, means that you're getting a similar experience to Apache Kafka, but without having to scale/configure everything yourself.

Sure, you have to become proficient with Event Hub, but becoming proficient with EH is probably 1/100th of the difficulty as becoming proficient enough in Kafka to support the same scalability/workload.

[Silhouette]

All I can say is that this hasn't been my experience. Setting up a single server is much the same whether it's on-prem or at a colo facility or some VM in the cloud, but the amount of added complexity to set up non-trivial networking and security and redundancy/failover and backups and all that stuff in the cloud is far more complicated -- if you don't already know how to do it -- than just setting up a few servers directly. The only exceptions IME tend to be the most basic and essential services, like effectively infinitely scalable storage and managed databases. Not coincidentally, I suspect, these are the kinds of cloud services that almost everyone uses, and often (as this very HN discussion demonstrates) the only ones.

There is still considerable value in the on-demand nature of cloud hardware, instead of waiting for stuff like physically assembling new servers and then shipping them and then installing them in the rack all before you can even start setting up the software, but IME the simplicity emperor has no clothes. Just look at the number of anecdotes about even quite large and well-established businesses that have had systems go down because they didn't fully understand AZs and failover arrangements, or have been landed with some crazy high bill because they didn't fully understand all the different things they were going to be charged for, or have been breached because they left some S3 bucket open.

[glogla]

Watching your discussion I think the truth might be somewhere in the middle - the Cloud can do things for you but you still need to learn how to use it.

So once you know your way around, it can be a force multiplier but learning cloud can be as much work as learning how to do it on your own.

Or said from a different angle, it help you outsource (part os) operations but it does not actually help you to engineer and architect things correctly, and you can shoot yourself in the foot pretty easily.

Personally, I think the cloud is most transformative for large companies with dynosaur internal IT, where it brings a lot of engineer self-service into the picture - where I work I can have RDS in minutes, or internally provisioned on-prem Oracle in a week, and the Oracle ends up being more expensive because 24/7 support has to be ordered from a specific list of vendors ... but that's not going to be the case in agile company with strong engineering culture.

[bird_monster]

> but the amount of added complexity to set up non-trivial networking and security and redundancy/failover and backups and all that stuff in the cloud is far more complicated

This complexity exists either way, is my point. Whether you're managing your own servers, or using barebones cloud VMs, or using a bunch of cloud fanciness, the complexity you just defined still exists. And if that complexity is a constant, why is it only being used as a negative against cloud services?

> Just look at the number of anecdotes about even quite large and well-established businesses that have had systems go down because they didn't fully understand AZs and failover arrangements, or have been landed with some crazy high bill because they didn't fully understand all the different things they were going to be charged for, or have been breached because they left some S3 bucket open.

If your argument is "It's not better when done badly", definitely, I agree, because what is?

I guess, my overall point is that cloud-based infrastructure shifts your focus. Yes, you have to know how to configure cloud resources, but in 2021, do you think it's easier to find people with AWS experience, or people with custom in-house or colo server management experience?