[molf]

> Every company out there is using the cloud and yet still employs infrastructure engineers

Every company beyond a particular size surely? For many small and medium sized companies hiring an infrastructure team makes just as little sense as hiring kitchen staff to make lunch.

[spwa4]

For small companies things like vercel, supabase, firebase, ... wipe the floor with Amazon RDS.

For medium sized companies you need "devops engineers". And in all honesty, more than you'd need sysadmins for the same deployment.

For large companies, they split up AWS responsibilities into entire departments of teams (for example, all clouds have math auth so damn difficult most large companies have -not 1- but multiple departments just dealing with authorization, before you so much as start your first app)

[add-sub-mul-div]

You're paying people to do the role either way, if it's not dedicated staff then it's taking time away from your application developers so they can play the role of underqualified architects, sysadmins, security engineers.

[scott_w]

From experience (because I used to do this), it’s a lot less time than a self-hosted solution, once you’re factoring in the multiple services that need to be maintained.

[flomo]

Yeah, and nobody is looking at the other side of this. There just are not a lot of good DBA/sysop type who even want to work for some non-tech SMB. So this either gets outsourced to the cloud, or some junior dev or desktop support guy hacks it together. And then who knows if the backups are even working.

Fact is a lot of these companies are on the cloud because their internal IT was a total fail.

[barnabee]

It depends very much what the company is doing.

At my last two places it very quickly got to the point where the technical complexity of deployments, managing environments, dealing with large piles of data, etc. meant that we needed to hire someone to deal with it all.

They actually preferred managing VMs and self hosting in many cases (we kept the cloud web hosting for features like deploy previews, but that’s about it) to dealing with proprietary cloud tooling and APIs. Saved a ton of money, too.

On the other hand, the place before that was simple enough to build and deploy using cloud solutions without hiring someone dedicated (up to at least some pretty substantial scale that we didn’t hit).