Well, seeing that there are only 24 hours in a day and that I refuse to work more than 40-45 hours a week....
There are two parts to any implementation - the parts that only you or your company can do - ie turn custom business requirements into code and the parts that anyone can do “The undifferentiated heavy lifting” like maintaining standard servers. Why would I spend the energy doing the latter instead of focusing on the former?
If I have an idea, how fast can I stand up and configure the resources I need with a private server room as compared to running a CloudFormation Template? What about maintenance and upgrades?
How many people would our company have to hire to babysit our infrastructure? Should we also hire someone overseas to set up a colo for our developers there so they don’t have to deal with the latency?
We are talking about a situation where you already have a server room and employees.
Typically what I've seen is that the developers are being starved out for resources in the on-prem hardware, and no amount of complaining or yelling or saber-rattling seems to do anything about it. But along comes cloud and we are willing to spend many times more money. The devs are happy because they can spin up hardware and apologize later, which feels really good until you find out people are spinning up more hardware instead of fixing an n^2 problem or something equally dumb in their code (like slamming a server with requests that always return 404).
We are talking about a situation where you already have a server room and employees.
And by “changing your processes” I guess I should also include “changing your people”. Automate the processes where you can, reduce headcount, and find ways to migrate to manage services where it makes sense.
The devs are happy because they can spin up hardware and apologize later, which feels really good until you find out people are spinning up more hardware instead of fixing an n^2 problem or something equally dumb in their code (like slamming a server with requests that always return 404).
I hate to say it, but throwing hardware at a problem long enough to get customers, prove the viability of an implementation and in start up world, get to the next round of funding or go public and then optimize is not always the wrong answer - see Twitter.
But, if you have bad developers they could also come up with less optimum solutions on prem and cause you to spend more.
With proper tagging, it’s easy to know where to point the finger when the bill arrives.
