You don’t need to physically rack servers, lots of systems integration vendors and remote hands will gladly put servers together for you. Most colos will gladly help you figure out connectivity. And there are lots of vendors, like Cisco, who will deliver a rack to your datacenter with virtualization software installed and everything, plug and play..
My point is there isn’t an either/or choice of using the cloud or building the universe from scratch, there are so many available options in-between. And while those options aren’t available conveniently behind an API and might require a few old school phone calls, you can save millions of dollars, get access to better performing hardware, have better control over data sovereignty, and 90%less lock-in if you choose to go down that road. It’s not for everyone but a /lot/ of workloads that people are running in the cloud can be done better elsewhere.
The person you're replying to is definitely overly flippant, but you've taken a sort of Gish gallop approach where you think if you list enough individual things that have to be done, that'll be overwhelming evidence that it's impossibly difficult. But the things you've listed aren't as hard as you want them to be on reasonable small business scales.
We are a company with 4 IT employees including myself, and two of us alone (both full-time programmers) handled our hybrid cloud migration. We rented a rack in a colocation facility. I learned how to design racks in a couple days and did the rack design myself. We bought servers from Dell and network equipment from Meraki. The colo facility found us an inexpensive contractor who racked and stacked everything to my design, and remote hands does any ongoing hardware maintenance. The other guy had an old, outdated CCNA and he designed the network. We got a fiber connection to AWS up and running for a hybrid cloud approach. All of this was very doable for a part-time two-man team with other job responsibilities and we're saving a ton of money for database and workstation hosting--big, expensive, totally static workloads. Perfect for on-prem. The ongoing savings vs. pure AWS exceeds my own salary.
It was clear from the outset that we could accomplish this. I wouldn't have signed us up for a boondoggle. Certainly, there are more demanding configurations where the complexity would be too high, but people act like on-prem is literally impossible without a team of dedicated staff in every case. It's not. It can be doable.
On-prem is like that. Yes, you have all the skills to originally stand it up. But you don’t know what you don’t know, and you make a bunch of resource trade-offs, usually by not implementing stuff that you’ll never need (until you do).
That was the point I was trying to make.
As I said though, the unique value of cloud is letting you focus on a business specific problem instead of reinventing wheels that have already been invented many times over.
As other a have pointed out, other benefits are scale-on-demand, pay only for what you use, and agility - if you have a great idea you don’t have to do a PO and wait months for a server.
AWS vs. on-prem is always a tradeoff. You have to look at the costs and benefits for your particular situation to decide which is best. We decided to go with both, because AWS has benefits for our dynamic workloads and on-prem has savings for our static workloads.
But what you described sounds like a packaging / software distribution issue.
Like, someone writes a one off Python script or program to do a thing and a year later it doesn't work because the host machine is using a newer version of Python and the dependencies need to be reinstalled to the new site-packages and they didn't document if they used the package manager or a virtualenv and a pip requirements file or setup.py or whatever.
The "it works on my machine" thing isn't really a "cloud" thing? It doesn't really solve the issue of having a weird bespoke service that nobody understands. Even if it's so abstracted from a normal computer that it has some esoteric requirement like an OCI image to run software, if the Dockerfile/Containerfile or whatever that generates the image doesn't exist/work/make sense then you have the same problem.
> As I said though, the unique value of cloud is letting you focus on a business specific problem instead of reinventing wheels that have already been invented many times over.
Reinventing the wheel like with docker ansible terraform kubernetes nomad aws?
Recently I was asked to help a company receive out of office replies to their web service that sent mail from Amazon SES. The client was sending mail from app.foo.org (with MX SPF for amazon) and wanted to receive them to foo.org (MX and SPF for outlook). Setting Reply-To or some other headers to foo.org worked in testing but not in practice. I maneuvered the amazon product menagerie and set up SES to get notifications on out of office replies and that also worked in testing but not in fact. Even then it would not store a list or provide details in the dashboard about replies without further using lambda or SQS or something. Every deficiency in an amazon product is "solved" by another amazon product. You're swallowing a horse to swallow a fly. In the end I just added AWS to the foo.org SPF records along with outlook's and set the From header accordingly; way simpler, didn't need to any more AWS products, and knowledge of DNS is more portable than knowledge of AWS. AWS is in the business of inventing wheels and trying to get you stay in their wheel ecosystem.
Not to contradict everything you're saying like you're wrong or something. I wonder what the circus is like for those of you who run it. Everything you say reads like high-level manager/sales engineer marketing talk from someone who spends all day in meetings. Not to say I'm an authority and that your voice is illegitimate; I'm just a resentful out of touch NEET waiting for the world to change to the point that I have nothing left to offer it.
From what I understand you need both a large or complex computational load and a lot of traffic before clouds should become the weapon of choice.
But Im not entirely sure.
