It really, really depends on on your use case, but there are some scenarios where bare metal just makes more sense. Also there are ones where cloud makes everything much easier.
North America-oriented B2B app that's a JavaScript SPA witch connects to some lightweight services fronting a database? I think that's a great contender for the cloud.
500-node Hadoop cluster running 24/7 with heavy load? You are going to see some huge savings by maintaining a Datacenter. You can use the extra 1.7MM/mo. to set up some robust networking equipment and have few people on-site.
Like every IT trend, "Cloud ops" is the trendy mind-slug that eats everyone's brain and makes them say that everyone who doesn't jump on the bandwagon is going to die broke and unloved in the gutter.
Remember how XML meant massively reduced integration costs and firing all your developers because GUI tools would let business managers connect pretty boxes and then kick back to watch the graphs go up and to the right as business exploded?
Yeah, so AWS is great, if you're building something that works well on AWS. And that's a large class of apps - if you're throwing up a Drupal front end to a CRUD line-of-business backend, need to push notifications and send some email, sure. You're dead in the middle of their target market.
Doing something interesting? Doesn't even have to be as massive as the parent suggests - if you're doing something that blows any of the billable parameters out of the sweet-spot, like bandwidth, storage, latency requirements, things that depend on system-locality, etc., you're much better off building, and using AWS for the pieces which can be broken off that don't hit the pain points.
That might get you one admin (we office workers have a mistaken belief that our salary is most of our cost. It's somewhere just north of half.).
What do you do when they're on vacation/sick/sleeping?
Thing is, I really want us to host our own stuff. For one thing if you don't host anything you lose all competence and then you really are beholden to your cloud provider.
But it seems to be that we are in this situation until someone figures out how to comodify servers - and server orchestration - to the point where this stuff gets cheaper to manage again.
This pendulum always swings. No sooner will we control our own hardware again than someone will come up with a new way to centralize it.
Totally, the thing that's super cool about the amazon instances you don't have to do anything with users, authentication, authorization, networking, dns, backups, monitoring, logging, firewall rules, security patches and upgrades.
With a bare metal server you have to manage all of that.
Oh my goodness man, have you managed Amazon instances? Setting up VPCs, IGW, IAM, DNS, EBS Snapshots (and deletions until recent lifecycle), custom metric in coudwatch, and Security Groups is a seriously challenging task just to learn the basics, much less do it right, much less automate it.
It's not a bed of roses in the physical world either, but you're simply wrong to say it's easy in the "Cloud" and hard in a DC/Bare Metal.
(it was a joke.) There are a zillion things to think about if you're going to have even one machine public on the internet, regardless of the hosting solution. At a small organization there's always that one programmer that's like half sysadmin.
I find it amusing that people pretend without bare metal, you'll get all of that person's time back.
Then you are just trading one fee for another, but the "sysadmin services" you are ordering most likely has slower response time, less resources, less knowledge, and worse uptime guarantees than someone like aws.
Yeah, at the larger sizes it might make sense, but not for everyone.
Nope you have a number for the person that provides the service and you can call her/him. Unless you are at several million per month spend at AWS have fun getting a hold of someone when sh#t hits the fan.
At smaller sizes too. If you just have one server, it's unlikely that the slower response time will loose you 3000 dollars per month which is the savings of dedicated service versus aws. Many small businesses run on leased hardware with on site support. Rackspace for instance made their fortune in that sector.
Well you're not comparing to AWS without ops, you're comparing to hiring someone for non-AWS vs managing AWS on your own. Outsourced ops know your systems. They have contracted guarantees. They can manage your own systems, hosted systems or even AWS. Using not-AWS saves you enough to pay for that.
I worked for a MSP for many years, and was well acquainted with our regional competitors. Our uptime and theirs was nowhere near AWS-level.
You're getting a different engineer every time you pick up the phone. They most certainly do not know your systems like an internal team would. I regularly saw cascading/circular issues caused by lack of familiarity and/or poor change management.
Owning and administering your own iron makes sense at a certain scale, but it's a much bigger scale than most companies will reach.
With correct pricing (3-year commitment), you're actually looking at about $8k/yr/server difference, for 64-core servers. If you're at the point where your workload requires ~12 64-core servers, that difference will net you $100k, which you can spend on the ops staffer.
