[steelegbr]

AWS may be overcharging but it's a balancing act. Going on-prem (well, shared DC) will be cheaper but comes with requirements for either jack of all trades sysadmins or a bunch of specialists. It can work well if your product is simple and scalable. A lot of places quietly achieve this.

That said, I've seen real world scenarios where complexity is up the wazoo and an opex cost focus means you're hiring under skilled staff to manage offerings built on components with low sticker prices. Throw in a bit of the old NIH mindset (DIY all the things!) and it's large blast radii with expensive service credits being dished out to customers regularly. On a human factors front your team will be seeing countless middle of the night conference calls.

While I'm not 100% happy with the AWS/Azure/GCP world, the reality is that on-prem skillsets are becoming rarer and more specialist. Hiring good people can be either really expensive or a bit of a unicorn hunt.

[mhitza]

It's a chicken and egg problem. If the cloud didn't become such a proeminent thing, the last decade and a half would have seen the rise of much better tools to manage on-premise servers (= requiring less in-depth sysadmin expertise). I think we're starting to see such tools appear in the last few years after enough people got burned by cloud bills and lockin.

[hibikir]

And don't forget the real crux of the problem: Do I even know whether a specialist is good or not? Hiring experts is really difficult if you don't have the skill in the topic, and if you do, you either not need an expert, or you will be biased towards those that agree with you.

It's not even limited to sysadmins, or in tech. How do you know whether a mechanic is very good, or iffy? Is a financial advisor giving you good advice, or basically robbing you? It's not as if many companies are going to hire 4 business units worth of on prem admins, and then decide which one does better after running for 3 years, or something empirical like that. You might be the poor sob that hires the very expensive, yet incompetent and out of date specialist, whose only remaining good skill is selling confidence to employers.

[dns_snek]

> Do I even know whether a specialist is good or not?

Of course but unless I misunderstood what you meant to say, you don't escape that by buying from AWS. It's just that instead of "sysadmin specialists" you need "AWS specialists".

If you want to outsource the job then you need to go up at least 1 more layer of abstraction (and likely an order of magnitude in price) and buy fully managed services.

[everfrustrated]

This only gets worse as you go higher in management. How does a technical founder know what good sales or marketing looks like? They are often swayed by people who can talk a good talk and deliver nothing.

[PenguinCoder]

I'm proudly 100% on prem Linux sys admin. There are not openings for my skills and they do not pay as well as whatever cloud hotness is "needed".

[marcosdumay]

Nobody is hiring generalists nowadays.

At the same time, the incredible complexity of the software infrastructure is making specialists more and more useless. To the point that almost every successful specialist out there is just some disguised generalist that decided to focus their presentation in a single area.

[whstl]

That's the crazy thing.

Most AWS-only Ops engineers I know are making bank and in high demand, and Ops teams are always HUGE in terms of headcount outside of startups.

The "AWS is cheaper" thing is the biggest grift in our industry.

[dumbledoren]

> AWS may be overcharging but it's a balancing act. Going on-prem (well, shared DC) will be cheaper but comes with requirements for either jack of all trades sysadmins or a bunch of specialists

Much easier to find. Even more, they are skills much easier to learn for existing engineers. What's better, they are fundamental skills that will never lose their value as those systems are what everything else is built on.

[canucktrash669]

Managed servers reduce the on-prem skillset requirement and can also deliver a lot of value.

The most frustrating part of hyperscalers is that it's so easy to make mistakes. Active tracking of you bill is a must, but the data is 24-48h late in some cases. So a single engineer can cause 5-figure regrettable spend very quickly.

[tayo42]

What size companies are we talking about

[bcrosby95]

It depends upon how many resources your software needs. At 20 servers we spend almost zero time managing our servers, and with modern hardware 20 servers can get you a lot.

Its easier than ever to do this but people are doing it less and less.