Doesn't make much sense for one server... but if you have 5, then you are looking at $200k. Then as you go up the numbers start making more sense.

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.

I missed it. Thanks.

It's not as if using AWS etc eliminates the need for a good sysadmin...

You can buy sysadmin services. This isn't a full time job at that level.

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.

Good luck hiring someone on a demand hourly basis that knows your stuff and won't break your stuff.

Hmm never had an issue, but to have people at AWS that know my stuff would start somewhere north of 100 million a year spend on AWS.

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.

> Outsourced ops know your systems.

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.