alt Hacker News> Once they are up and running
You should also calculate the cost of getting it up and running. With Google Cloud (I don't actually use AWS), I mainly worry about building docker containers in CI and deploying them to vms and triggering rolling restarts as those get replaced with new ones. I don't worry about booting them. I don't worry about provisioning operating systems or configuration to them. Or security updates. They come up with a lot of pre-provisioned monitoring and other stuff. No effort required on my side.
And for production setups. You need people on stand by to fix the server in case of hardware issues; also outside office hours. Also, where does the hardware live? What's your process when it fails? Who drives to wherever the thing is and fixes it? What do you pay them to be available for that? What's the lead time for spare components? Do you actually keep those in supply? Where? Do you pay for security for wherever all that happens? What about cleaning, AC, or a special server room in your building. All that stuff is cost. Some of it is upfront cost. Some of it is recurring cost.
The article is a about a company that owns its own data center. The cost they are citing (5 million) is substantial and probably a bit more complete. That's one end of the spectrum.
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> You should also calculate the cost of getting it up and running.
I was not doing the calculation. I was only pointing out that it was not as simple as you make it out to be.
Okay, a few other things that aren't in most calculations:
1. Looking at jobs postings in my area, the highest paid ones require experience with specific cloud vendors. The FTEs you need to "manage" the cloud are a great deal more expensive than developers.
2. You don't need to compare on-prem data center with AWS - you can rent a pretty beefy VPS or colocate for a fraction of the cost of AWS (or GCP, or Azure) services. You're comparing the most expensive alternative when avoiding cloud services, not the most typical.
3. Even if you do want to build your own on-prem rack, FTEs aren't generally paid extra for being on the standby rota. You aren't paying extra. Where you will pay extra is for hot failovers, or machine room maintenance, etc, which you don't actually need if your hot failover is a cheap beefy VPS-on-demand on Hetzner, DO, etc.
4. You are measuring the cost of absolute 0% downtime. I can't think of many businesses that have such high sensitivity to downtime. Even banks handle downtime much larger than that even while their IT systems are still up. With such strict requirements you're getting into the spot where the business itself cannot continue because of catastrophe, but the IT systems can :-/. What use is the IT systems when the business itself may be down?
The TLDR is:
1. If you have highly paid cloud-trained FTEs, and
2. Your only option other than Cloud is on-prem, and
3. Your FTEs are actually FT-contractors who get paid per hour, and
4. Your uptime requirements are moire stringent than national banks,
yeah, then cloud services are only slightly more expensive.
You know how many businesses fall into that specific narrow set of requirements?
You are massively overcomplicating this.
> I don't worry about booting them. I don't worry about provisioning operating systems or configuration to them. Or security updates. They come up with a lot of pre-provisioned monitoring and other stuff. No effort required on my side.
These are not difficult problems. You can use the same/similar cloud install images.
A 10 year old nerd can install Linux on a computer; if you're a professional developer I'm sure you can read the documentation and automate that.
> And for production setups. You need people on stand by to fix the server in case of hardware issues; also outside office hours.
You could use the same person who is on standby to fix the cloud system if that has some failure.
> Also, where does the hardware live?
In rented rackspace nearby, and/or in other locations if you need more redundancy.
> What's your process when it fails? Who drives to wherever the thing is and fixes it? What do you pay them to be available for that? What's the lead time for spare components? Do you actually keep those in supply? Where?
It will probably report the hardware failure to Dell/HP/etc automatically and open a case. Email or phone to confirm, the part will be sent overnight, and you can either install it yourself (very, very easy for things like failed disks) or ask a technician to do it (I only did this once with a CPU failure on a brand new server). Dell/HP/etc will provide the technician, or your rented datacentre space will have one for simpler tasks like disks.