Comment by AnthonyMouse
4 years ago
Most of what you're listing are Layer 7 services. The time cost there is in the configuration. You can put Active Directory in the cloud, but it's still going to be Active Directory, i.e. a massively complicated proprietary framework that touches every Windows system in your network like an octopus.
And some of those things actually make sense. You can't really locally host a CDN, can you? If you need a big amount of compute for an hour and then never again, it doesn't make much sense to buy hardware for that.
But the point isn't that it never makes sense to put anything in the cloud at all. It's that companies regularly overuse it as some kind of buzzword panacea when there are only a specific set of things that it's actually good for.
It’s not just “configuration”. There is also the issue of continuous monitoring and upkeep. Not to mention someone has to worry about servers going down, hard drives going bad, backups. Would any one person know how to configure and maintain everything above?
I’m a developer who happens to have AWS in my toolbelt. I could set all that up by myself. In the the two years that I worked there, we never had an issue with any of it.
How much in house expertise would we have had to hire to manage everything that we used?
> There is also the issue of continuous monitoring and upkeep. Not to mention someone has to worry about servers going down, hard drives going bad, backups.
Monitoring and backups you configure once and then they're automated. Disk failures happen maybe a couple times a year and take five minutes to stick in another disk. None of this is particularly labor intensive.
> Would any one person know how to configure and maintain everything above?
It has long been a fact of life in companies small enough to have a single-person IT department.
Disk failures only happen once or twice a year when you have an infrastructure required to support the infrastructure the size I mentioned if you were running on prem - across multiple geographically dispersed locations? How many people are you going to have to hire to make sure it’s running? Patched? Will one person know how to optimize the 25 services we used? All of those services are redundant across multiple servers.
As far as the backups, how long would it take you to recover from a disaster? Do you have a team of people who are experts on all 25 different surfaces?
It was a pain when I did my first and only on prem from scratch infrastructure that consisted of multiple environments just running Consul, Fabio, Nomad, Vault, Mongo, Memcached and Sql Server. We also had on prem builds and deployments using agents orchestrated by Visual Studio Team Services (now called Azure Devops, basically TFS online.)
The prod environment was running clustered for all of the services. I left off my original list Amazon Certificate Manager that automatically provisions and renews SSL certificates. The IT department had to keep up with SSL certificates.
Our on prem infrastructure was a pain to manage and didn’t have anywhere near the reliability. I know we didn’t keep everything up to date and patched.
Backups were a pain to manage and no one ever verified if they worked.