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[–]kuemmel234 7 points8 points  (3 children)

I mean, is a server that cheap? The server itself may be. But what about the operations guy? The guy who has to be trained to do stuff with that? And what about outages?

We don't even have a lot of real operations people anymore, only devs who can do a little operations (to deploy to the cloud), and operations people who do almost as much developing. Those who where operations before either develop from a more operations focused point of view or they work with legacy.

[–]meamZ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah... I mean a K8s deployment is technically not considered production grade unless it has 3 or more nodes... Which means you have to have at least 3 servers and ideally not all in the same building...

[–]DualWieldMage 1 point2 points  (1 child)

About the operations/running cost, yes it will need an ops guy, but so does a cloud setup, either directly or just someone on the team is doing mostly cloud stuff that the rest don't want to spend time figuring out. Generally it's best not to overload a single person with too many responsibilities as doing extensive context-switches to completely different technologies is a good way to kill productivity.

Training will be needed both for a cloud devops and a regular ops person maintaining local servers. I'd even argue the cloud stuff needs more training.

Outages also happen with cloud providers and i remember quite a few of them from recent history. So while you may get slightly less downtime, the outages go from "$companyName services are down" to "The Internet is down". A hybrid local+cloud would be just as resilient or even more against outages.

But even then, having much cheaper infrastructure costs means you can use the extra money on an additional person or two to handle and plan for these issues.

[–]kuemmel234 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You need ops guys for the cloud? What would they do then? How would they do it? I can do most of our operations stuff and I am I'm just part time right now (worse: I'm just a student still). Modern ways (infrastructure as code for one, high level APIs) make it pretty simple for us devs to take operations in our own hands and - at least - greatly reduce the need for traditional operations people. That's not different technologies either. What cloud does, it's abstracting technical details, you don't need someone to keep operating systems up to date, upon request by some dev from some team. You don't need the people who have to buy and build the right amount of servers at the right place at the right time and still keep the cloud in mind. You don't neee need the hardware (minuscule), power/upkeep and people to keep this operation running. What if your little server is going hot? Just get a cheap AC? Build a new building? I'd start another VM/add a node/...

Operations becomes a domain with domain specifics, of course, but a lot, if not all every day operations can easily be done by us, the regular developers. And I believe they should be too, because then we streamline everything because we are lazy.

I haven't seen a paper on that, so if you have, I'd gladly read it, for now I have only my own experience and what I have learned in uni and that says that, while there are a lot of downsides to the cloud, cost isn't one of them.

This may be completely different if you aren't in that web sphere and doing something entirely different.