[ericyan]

> The business case is that someone else is doing the infrastructure management for you.

Many business people believe that moving to cloud can reduce the headcount needed for managing the infra, but that is usually not what's happening. You will still need more or less the same amount of people to patch the OS and configure the networking, but with a slightly different skill set -- instead of Cisco IOS commands, they now need to deal with AWS transit gateway.

Every data center I worked with offers on-site remote hands that will rack new servers or replace hard drives or PSUs for you. There are also third-party companies that offers this service. Redundant power and air conditioning are the responsibility of the colocation provider and those are covered by the SLA. Those data centres do have generators on-site.

That said, configuring you top-of-rack switch is usually not covered by the co-location contract. This need to be done by a network engineer, usually the same person that would manage VPCs.

[antonvs]

If you're treating cloud as a sort of 1:1 replacement of hardware infrastructure, then what you're saying makes sense.

But we don't ever "patch the OS." Our cloud provider does that for us. Upgrades and patching are automatic within the maintenance window. We deploy containers, the OS is just a platform layer that the cloud provider manages.

As for needing "more or less the same amount of people", that simply isn't true IME. I've seen startups with whole teams devoted to running systems in a datacenter, whereas cloud-based startups will often have one or two guys, possibly even part-time, dealing with their cloud requirements.

At larger companies, it can be harder to make this comparison, since you'll typically have a mixture of cloud and onprem. But if you look at teams with products deployed in the cloud, they'll often have much more frequent deployment, with better automation, and much less dependence on the always overcommitted infrastructure team(s).

> Every data center I worked with offers on-site remote hands that will rack new servers or replace hard drives or PSUs for you.

That's not very compatible with infrastructure as code. You're essentially saying "keep doing things the old inefficient way, it's not really that bad."

There are all sorts of failure scenarios that a managed cloud system can cover from completely automatically within minutes, that would require frantic calls to remote hands in the old world. And even when recovery isn't automatic, it may still require nothing more than some pointing and clicking to recover.

> instead of Cisco IOS commands, they now need to deal with AWS transit gateway.

> This need to be done by a network engineer, usually the same person that would manage VPCs.

These aren't comparable at all. Unless a company has some sort of very special networking requirements, they can set up VPCs with some pointing and clicking in the cloud provider's web UI. This is a far cry from the level of knowledge required to manage networks at the hardware level.

[rewmie]

> But we don't ever "patch the OS." Our cloud provider does that for us.

This is absolutely not true. Unless your cloud services are limited to function-as-a-service and serverless/containerized applications,you are indeed responsible for "patching the OS".

This kind of thing is explicitly covered even by AWS' intro to AWS courses, namely in its shared responsibility model.

> As for needing "more or less the same amount of people", that simply isn't true IME. I've seen startups with whole teams devoted to running systems in a datacenter, whereas cloud-based startups will often have one or two guys, possibly even part-time, dealing with their cloud requirements.

Sorry, your claim is outright unbelievable. I've never seen a company who owned any web application that only had "one or two guys, possibly even part-time, dealing with their cloud requirements." Unless the whole company is only "one or two guys, possibly even part-time", your claim simply is extremely far-fetched and blatantly unbelievable.

[Nullabillity]

And now you need to patch the containers, too!

[ericyan]

I see, so you are using PaaS and I was talking about IaaS offerings. The term cloud is so vaguely defined that it can mean so many things.

If the PaaS works for your scale and budget then it’s perfectly fine. I just want to mention that it is probably no longer the case for scaled-ups.