It costs a lot of money to run your own datacenters, and very very few companies are capable of doing it as good as AWS or even Scaleway/OVH can. By that I mean, waiting weeks/months to get through tickets, approvals, multiple different teams just to get a server deployed. Then waiting a few more weeks for monitoring/backups.
Allowing developers and related to have hardware/software at a whim is a massive advantage.
I’m increasingly convinced that the large scale companies that don’t do bare-metal because they never learned how, and all the people advising them have never done bare metal or have done it poorly, so it’s like the blind leading the blind.. But they are leaving a 50-90% cost savings, better control over reliability, latency, data residency, etc on the table by doing so.
Remote hands won't order your servers, configure your networking, install OSes/configure your PXE, and all the other tedious things running your own DC entails.
Yes, most DIY DCs are done terribly, that's to whole point - if so many people struggle with that, doesn't it make sense to just outsource it?
You're really paying somewhere between the savings of putting a datacenter in Nowhere, Oregon and the cost to convince someone to live there.
Also, AWS's egress likely costs much more than the datacenter's; again, possible savings very much depend on the kind of load you have.
Comparing either to AWS will inevitably lead to a much more complex discussion about spot instances, traffic costs, ancillary services etc.
At least mine doesn't seem to care even slightly, nor did my previous one.
I'm fairly certain this is an argument that we in the tech community make because we heard someone else make it.
When asking finance people blankly: having capital expenditure on the books is not a problem.
The upside is that it's much cheaper once you're at the scale where you no longer need to variableise your compute costs, but can tank the up-front fixed costs and do proper capacity planning.
Those people are speaking from greater experience - there are many things which seem easy but aren’t once you’re over a certain scale, and at large organizations you often have things like conflicting policies or coordinated demand (e.g. your slack capacity disappears when every project is trying to hit the same budget deadline or a change moratorium ends, a pipe breaks in building A and you need to shift a ton of previously-stable systems for 6 months, etc.).
You can do that kind of capacity planning well but it’s harder than it looks and often politically challenging because the benefits aren’t obvious. Cutting corners looks like saving money right up until it doesn’t. If you aren’t buying servers by the hundred or storage by the petabyte, you are unlikely to be competitive with a cloud service without sacrificing multiple of performance, reliability, timeliness, and security.
Look at your demand pattern (variable or stable, predictable or unpredictable) and what cost structures your finances can support (variable or fixed, up-front or as-you-go), pick a solution based on that, not what's cool.
I don't like the idea that the only way to get developers moving is to use cloud, but I agree that it's a solid replacement for really bad ops.
What I've seen in many places is an abstraction over bare metal, some are better than others, openstack, Kubernetes on-prem, vmware etc; are all solutions that have differing amounts of adoption. Ubisoft had a lot of stuff in this area, as does Google. Ubisofts was pretty terrible though.
If you need a physical machine to be deployed, you've hit a certain level of scale and your load is much more known: and even though it can take a few weeks, what you get back is quite competitive.
But if you're waiting for hardware to get anything moving in the first place then that's obviously bad.
What I've taken to doing is prototyping on Google Cloud and then planning to migrate things to on-prem once everything is reaching maturity.
If you actually do the math it is pretty much a wash vs using AWS. Yes you will pay a lot more upfront, but over a 5 year period (standard warranty length, and typical deprecation time) it pretty much evens out compared to AWS. I am sure there are many uses cases where on-prem would actually be cheaper than AWS over 5 years.
At the companies I work for the red-tape isn't nearly as bad as you make it seem (or have perhaps experienced at places you have worked). The biggest time sink right now is the ongoing supply chain issues and vendors just not having equipment, the approvals/tickets are pretty quick where I work.
They’re a $6B revenue company that most people haven’t heard of. Their expertise is in building data centers for other data center companies.
