alt Hacker NewsIt's all good while it works.
The day it broke, it's a PITA.
You need that RAID card which is not available anywhere around you.
You need to visit your Data Center, but you suddenly have issues with security and you need to arrange all that stuff.
You need to buy DDR stick but you need to wait a month for delivery.
The guy who knows how to insert a stick took a vacation week ago, and everyone else is too afraid to touch big iron box.
With cloud, you either don't notice that, because they have scale and they have spare parts and they have personnel 24/7. Or worst case you order identical server and deploy your app, hopefully in a few hours restoring from backup.
And for some people it might never broke. But it's all the uncertainty and fear that leads people to cloud solutions. You don't plan for average outcome, you plan for worst outcome.
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That exact line of thinking is how our costs increased 8x over 2 years.
And you're not immune from those issues in AWS. What happens when you run out of EBS IOPS or have to change instance type and it won't boot? What happens when your instance fails? What happens if you hit a quota limit in the middle of a failover?
AWS support is fucking awful unless you pay $5k a month or 10% of your total spend (whatever is greater) and then it's only mediocre.
Yes, you will need to keep a spare running. And have written (and tested!) procedures around how to switch to the spare when members of your team are away.
> You need that RAID card which is not available anywhere around you.
If you're small enough to not be able to justify spares, then rent servers instead. It's still cheaper than the big cloud providers.
> You need to visit your Data Center, but you suddenly have issues with security and you need to arrange all that stuff.
You rarely do. Anywhere beyond the cheapest third-rate colo provider provides "remote hands" services.
Even when managing several racks worth of hardware, I'd go into the colo facilities a couple of times a year at most.
> and they have spare parts and they have personnel 24/7
Even tiny colo-providers still have personnel 24/7, and you can buy fractional devops services for small retainers from any number of providers (like me).