alt Hacker NewsHaving gone from managing several thousand physical to virtual/cloud instances, there are certainly major differences and the company has to structure its approach accordingly (IMO).
On premise in my opinion needs a dedicated team managing hardware and leverage solutions to provide that as VM's/Containers/etc to teams. Another team focused on OS level security and base image, then your dev teams can effectively focus on their app and leverage the automated tools provided by the hardware and OS teams.
Cloud gives you at least half of that, or all of it depending on your approach, for a cost. There are points where the cost makes sense and times when it doesn't, and typically that changes through the life of a company. Unfortunately there is a not insignificant overhead even with current tools to maintaining a truly substrate agnostic infrastructure that can be deployed on top of multiple clouds, on-premise etc... so companies are locked in even when economics change.
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> On premise in my opinion needs a dedicated team managing hardware and leverage solutions to provide that as VM's/Containers/etc to teams. Another team focused on OS level security and base image, then your dev teams can effectively focus on their app and leverage the automated tools provided by the hardware and OS teams.
Exactly. At which point, you’re essentially reinventing a cloud, usually not very well. If you have access to really good people you can pull this off, and that’s why you see so many people on HN doing the “who needs cloud” flex.
But the reality is that for most companies, managing non-trivial amounts of hardware is not a core competency, and they regularly shoot themselves in the foot by trying it.
> On premise in my opinion needs a dedicated team managing hardware and leverage solutions to provide that as VM's/Containers/etc to teams.
You're assuming that "On premise" equates to "inside our building, in racks we've installed, using power and networking we have to manage." You're correct if that's the case for your business, but my argument is based around the idea that you can use _managed_ hosting providers of physical hardware that'll be either next door to you, in the same city, or close to your users (i.e, you're a business in Germany but your customer base is in London, so you host the servers using a London based provider.)
The idea that you have to manage hardware is greatly diminished when you consider the availability of managed providers that are dirt cheap.