Is it? Over the two years they saved, this is about the salary for 100 engineers. Can you replace and maintain all the cloud aspects that AWS provides you with (I mean the ones you actually use) with 100 engineers? Maybe, if they are good engineers (which is kinda implied by the 300k salary tag in the calculation). If it's worth it, remains to be seen. Definitely nothing for any medium sized company.

Dropbox is huge and has a relatively simple, highly optimized use-case, for which cloud perhaps doesn't offer too much. This is NOT the norm. For most companies, no matter the size, building their own cloud is a no go.

> those features are killed off and vanish from the face of the earth?

Don't use Google Cloud then ;).

> but if we consider the absurd premium charged by cloud providers for their services...

Do you have any data on backing this up? This "absurd premium" includes the salaries of engineers to develop it, maintain it, do DevOps, keep the hardware/data centers, do marketing, etc. etc. There is of course a margin, these companies aren't doing it as a social service... That margin is highly variable from service to service and also between cloud providers. Some may not have a margin at all, others may run at a loss. There is not easy "uh everything is overpriced". Most companies will have a VERY hard time providing the offering at the price of large cloud providers. And the simple "back of the envelope" calculations often miss all the work & cost that needs to be done, but you don't know about...

> Well, those "others" doing the work can be employed by your company and you still save money.

Yeah, if your company is really big, then yes. If your revenue is below 100 million, there isn't even room for any discussion on this: Don't run your own cloud, it's not gonna work. Most of the "cons" I see are about misunderstandings of the offerings and failure to navigate the pricing models and picking the cheapest offerings that do the job. If you fail to do even that, how on earth are you going to run your own cloud?

I work at a medium sized company. Depends on who you count, but let's say around ~30 devs.

Recently we basically did just this, and it's been a great success. We haven't fully migrated and still use AWS for prod, but have seen substantial savings already.

We spent $2k on servers, Dell r720s. We bought a UPS and mount, and racked them in our office. I installed OpenShift 4 on it, which is Red Hat's Kubernetes offering with a nice web GUI, and setup a few terabytes of NFS to automatically provision storage.

To be fair, installing OpenShift for the first time took a while, around 3 weeks. Since then it's been smooth. We still use AWS, but our usage has gone down dramatically. We are still only migrating dev and test environments, leaving prod in AWS (we don't want to be responsible for uptime SLAs, and clients pay prod hosting costs). Some of these projects are CPU heavy, machine learning and computer vision projects too. They're not just simple web-apps. I'm not privy to our entire AWS budget, but I know that one project which we migrated saved over $500/mo.

After installation, maintenance has taken barely any time. Around 10-20% of my time is dedicated to OpenShift cluster maintenance. The rest I do normal project work. I often go weeks without having to touch anything, and the most common task I do is onboard new users. We've had 2 outages in over 6mo, one was an expiring cert and one was an airflow issue on the rack. I've learnt a lot and am certainly not an expert. These were the firs rack servers I'd ever worked with personally, although I had been researching used models for home use for a while (shoutout to /r/Homelab).

In fact, I had such success doing this that I personally bought a Dell r720 and have used it to selfhost a bunch of stuff at home. A co-worker of mine hosts his self hosted lab on AWS. Things like Plex, private photo storage, a few other toys, etc. He says he pays $300/mo, which seems insane to me, but I guess people streaming 4K plex adds up. The used r720 server I bought was $1,500CAD and has way more horsepower than he's paying for. (There are also electricity costs I haven't factored in here, as I'm trying to control for other changes in my power bill. Might be $100/mo at most.)

You're not doing anything even remotely close to the features offered by cloud providers or even managed hosting providers.

Disaster recovery? Geographically separate redundant servers with failovers? Automated (and proven to work) backups? One-stop access control for infra maintenance? Audit controls for your database and storage objects? Tape backups?

Even today to support all those things you need a small army of specialists. Granted, a heck of a lot of things can get away with not having any of this. But the use cases are out there and hosting and maintaining all of that in-prem is another different level.

I understand your use case, but your is very, very far from the sheer and absolute complexity and features that enterprise data centers have.

So what?

Who in their right mind believes in, say, you need to operate and maintain half a dozen types of RDBMS in three flavors along with two or four or eight different message brokers and your own convoluted infrastructure-as-code multiplied by three along with a repackaged FLOSS offering... And a ground station?

Let's not be mad, here. There are proper, full-blown, popular, global-scale cloud service providers. That. Only. Offer. VMs.

Are we so drunk with corporate kool-aid to believe that we are missing out because we are missing... What do you believe you're missing, actually?

I repeat: there are popular professional cloud service providers whose business consists of providing either VMs or access to bare metal. That's where real-world companies run their real-world businesses. Why are we supposed to believe that you need more to operate your own stuff?

This is about as far from the truth as I have experienced in life.

Fortune 500 companies have an innumerable number of platforms for software, use hundreds of products from dozens of vendors, many dead long ago. Same thing with governments, at every level of scale. Telecoms? Utility providers? Medium-sized businesses who are not in tech? Specialist software that runs in a basement rack and that eventually gets moved to a datacenter and compliance requirements begin demanding all the bells and whistles I just mentioned.

Without a doubt there's a lot of gross compute power that lives on the VMs you just mentioned. But all their financial processing is probably about a fraction of what some AS/400 or mainframe doing a nightly batch job, with software running from decades ago and licensing costs going into 7 figures a year.

What you're asking for just doesn't exist. You can do what you're mentioning across, maybe, a single product line and a half-dozen teams. But even that company needs to use CRMs, ERPs, and custom stuff for which you cannot possibly define platform requirements on your own, limited, terms.

A customer that I used to admin their Unix servers on had software on IBM mainframes, IBM AS/400s, Solaris, AIX, two SCO Unix machines running some proprietary hardware control plane, a few thousand Windows machines, etc. You want a "real" ERP product? It's gonna run on Oracle or DB2, forget about Postgres. That app you made 15 years ago running on MySQL with the ISAM storage engine? Forget about ever upgrading that. Need to interact with banks? Holy smokes have I got bad news for you. You need software to interact with medical records that requires special legal compliance across multiple jurisdictions? Well, no one cares what that runs on as long as it keeps the millions rolling in.

These are our dev+test setups, and we're looking far more carefully at prod for the reasons you touch on. Those aren't necessary for every project too, eg hosting computer vision demos.

For our government projects, the government hosts it on their own OpenShift cluster that they maintain (including their own data centre), due to requirements for all data to be hosted within our boarders. The OpenShift cluster I setup is no-where near as well maintained as the governments, they have multiple FTE and it runs most of the open source gov't code. They have tape backups, rolling on-call staff, public developer chat for support, the whole deal.

What I setup is far more simple. We have daily/weekly/monthly rolling backups of postgres pods. We store some backups of those on digital ocean, but that's just a cheapo litttle linux server.

But now a team of 30 developers can easily spin up their own projects using a web-based GUI from basically just providing a Dockerfile or a link to a git repo. One of the oft-touted organizational benefits of "cloud" is that you don't have to wait a week for Ops to provision a VM. We get all that.

>I understand your use case, but your is very, very far from the sheer and absolute complexity and features that enterprise data centers have.

My point is that many things people host in AWS do not need enterprise quality. If you're a startup, then almost by definition you do not need enterprise quality (though, as always, it depends). We made a tonne of savings. I'm sure many others would by self-hosting and learning a moderate amount of Linux / Kubernetes.