alt Hacker Newsthis is what we did in the 90ies into mid 2000:
> Buy and colocate the hardware yourself – Certainly the cheapest option if you have the skills
back then this type of "skill" was abundant. You could easily get sysadmin contractors who would take a drive down to the data-center (probably rented facilities in a real-estate that belonged to a bank or insurance) to exchange some disks that died for some reason. such a person was full stack in a sense that they covered backups, networking, firewalls, and knew how to source hardware.
the argument was that this was too expensive and the cloud was better. so hundreds of thousands of SME's embraced the cloud - most of them never needed Google-type of scale, but got sucked into the "recurring revenue" grift that is SaaS.
If you opposed this mentality you were basically saying "we as a company will never scale this much" which was at best "toxic" and at worst "career-ending".
The thing is these ancient skills still exist. And most orgs simply do not need AWS type of scale. European orgs would do well to revisit these basic ideas. And Hetzner or Lithus would be a much more natural (and honest) fit for these companies.
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> ancient skills https://youtu.be/ZtYU87QNjPw?&t=10
It baffles me that my career trajectory somehow managed to insulate me from ever having to deal with the cloud, while such esoteric skills as swapping a hot swap disk or racking and cabling a new blade chassis are apparently on the order of finding a COBOL developer now. Really?
I can promise you that large financial institutions still have datacenters. Many, many, many datacenters!
I wonder how much companies pay yearly in order to avoid having an employee pick up a drive from a local store, drive to the data center, pull the disk drive, screw out the failing hard drive and put in the new one, add it in the raid, verify the repair process has started, and then return to the office.