Comment by mlthoughts2018
4 years ago
As a manager of a team of application product developers I can tell you, the headcount cost of ops teams & the time cost of taking people whose job shouldn’t involve vm provisioning overhead but nonetheless does are both huge compared to cloud services. In cloud tooling, my team of people all with zero experience doing vm provisioning can get production systems up, add logging, add alerting, add networking, etc., all very easily or with just low touch overhead from teams that manage best practices or compliance. Creating the same internal developer tool experience with data centers is SO expensive and requires a major headcount investment.
It's always shocking to see how inefficiently some companies are operated.
The things you're describing should take a single individual a matter of seconds for a system which is already in operation, and a one-time cost of a few hours to set up at the outset (i.e. once or twice a decade). If it takes significantly longer to do locally than it takes to input into the cloud provider's interface, something's not right.
I can tell you where most companies go wrong here though. It's in excessive specialization. If you put separate people in charge of provisioning, networking, logging, etc. then you create a ton of friction to do anything because you need five different humans to touch it and they all have to coordinate. One person can do all of those things, as you've learned when one person does it interacting with the cloud providers. And when one person is doing all of it, it takes only seconds to do.
I listed all of the services we used across five environments and most across three availability zones. So one person was going to manage what on prem would be roughly 200 VMs/services and make sure they stay patched, the OS stays updated? Locally, a lot of those services would run in a cluster for availability.
There is no company on earth that has one person managing an on prem implementation of that level of complexity.
One person does it in a cloud environment because they aren’t managing hardware, patching, etc.
> So one person was going to manage what on prem would be roughly 200 VMs/services and make sure they stay patched, the OS stays updated?
You're talking about the applications, i.e. the guests, not the hosts. It should be completely reasonable to expect a single person to be able to manage the hosts, including the networking for the hosts, the backups of the guest images by the hosts, etc. The services themselves may be arbitrarily complicated and require a large number of people to configure and manage, but that's the same as it is with cloud providers.
There is also a simple way to handle guest OS updates in most cases. Turn on automatic updates, and keep automated VM snapshots in case one goes bad.
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