[bird_monster]

> The thing is, I don't think the complexity is even close to the same in the two cases.

Agreed (but probably on the opposite end as you)

It seems a lot like you've been scorned in the past and that's driving a lot of your statements now (which is totally fine and fair). I'm trying to bring up that, for every problem you've just defined, the literal exact same problem exists for colo/managed servers, except it is now also your problem to keep the lights on and the machine running.

> literally every small business I have ever worked in as a tech worker has had several people at the office who were perfectly capable of buying a switch or firewall or router and spending the few minutes required to configure it or buying a server and installing Linux/Windows and then whatever server software it needed again very quickly.

I'm sorry, if you believe that building and deploying production-ready server infrastructure is as easy as "Just going out and buying a switch and spending a few MINUTES installing linux" (emphasis mine) - I feel like we aren't talking about the same thing at all. Not even close.

[Silhouette]

Not scorned, just a little bored of being told by advocates how the cloud will do wonders for my businesses or my clients and then seeing the end results not live up to the hype.

I'm not saying there are no benefits to cloud deployment. It does have some clear advantages, and I've repeatedly cited the rapid deployment of the hardware and connectivity in this very discussion, for example. It hasn't come up much so far in the parts of the discussion I've been in, but I would never claim there is no-one with a good use for the more niche services among the hundreds available from the likes of AWS, either.

However, I mostly operate in the world of smaller businesses, and in this world simplicity is king when it comes to infrastructure. We are interested in deploying our software so people can run it, whether that's for a client's internal use or something that's running online and publicly accessible. Setting up a new server is mostly a case of installing the required OS and hosting tools, and then our software will take over (and that work would be essentially the same wherever it is hosted), once you have the hardware itself installed and connected. Configuring a new office network is something you'd probably do in a day, again once the physical aspects have been completed. You slightly mangled the timescales I actually suggested in your quote, BTW.

These systems are often maintained by a small number of team members who have the relevant knowledge as a sideline to their day jobs. And this approach has been working for decades, and continues to work fine today. Perhaps I have just never met the bogeyman where the operational requirements to maintain the IT infrastructure for a small business (say up to 50 people) are somehow unmanageable by normal people with readily available skills in a reasonable amount of time, so the arguments about somehow radically improving efficiency by outsourcing those aspects to cloud services have never resonated much with me. It's a big world, and of course YMMV.