alt Hacker News> With on premise, you need someone that will install racks, change disks, setup high availability block storage or object storage, etc. Those are not DevOps people.
we have 7 racks and 3 people. The things you mentioned aren't even 5% of the workload.
There are things you figure out once, bake into automation, and just use.
You install server once and remove it after 5-10 years, depending on how you want to depreciate it. Drives die rarely enough it's like once every 2 months event at our size
The biggest expense is setting up automation (if I was re-doing our core infrastructure from scratch I'd probably need good 2 months of grind) but after that it's free sailing. Biggest disadvantage is "we need a bunch of compute, now", but depending on business that might never be a problem, and you have enough savings to overbuild a little and still be ahead. Or just get the temporary compute off cloud.
> Biggest disadvantage is "we need a bunch of compute, now"
And depending on the problem set in question, one can also potentially leverage "the cloud" for the big bursty compute needs and have the cheap colo for the day to day stuff.
For instance, in a past life the team I worked on needed to run some big ML jobs while having most things on extremely cheap colo infra. Extract the datasets, upload the extracted and well-formatted data to $cloud_provider, have VPN connectivity for the small amount of other database traffic, and we can burst to have whatever compute needed to get the computations done really quick. Copy the results artifact back down, deploy to cheap boxes back at the datacenter to host for clients stupid-cheap.