Comment by scarface74
4 years ago
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.
Many devs don't want to do any of that, they would rather have everything run in docker and not worry about any of the above (which if you can afford it at scale it can make sense, personally I'm not of that ethos and try to stay away from companies like that, as its great for me personally to work in a place where the devs can jump in anywhere rather just be tied down in their silo).
I think its easier for some companies to just pay amazon for all these services than to hire engineers be able to do what you are talking about. For a certain type of company (well established, known resource loads) it can make sense now (though risk huge lock-in costs and wont be able to move fast enough when they arrive), but I've seen/worked at many start ups that try to do the full cloud setups above and just get blown out from just costs alone.
The last company I worked at (south east asia start up, with just me originally as the dev, but grew to about 5 more devs when I left) we only had s3, cloudfront (though we put cdn77 infront of it cause bandwidth in SEA is a rip off with aws), and rds with postgres (and I wanted to move away from this cause backups and resizes from sql dumps are a PITA and take way too long when you have to do it over the network vs on the instance) and ran every other service we needed on ec2 instances (load balancer/auto scaling with nginx+3rd party modules + python daemon with boto3 api, rabbitmq, solr, memcached, dnscache, pgbouncer, letsencryot, deployments to prod/staging/one off envs for random stuff with fabric building what was needed on a workbench then spin up instances from an AMI image [1/4 the cost compared to using docker, with init scripts that turned off/on applications depending on what the server was need for] to about 40+ machines at max site load]) and had to support 40+ customer domains which overall was 8-10x cheaper than the "all-in" AWS abomination an AWS consultant cooked up before we went that route.
No, with the cloud providers - they manage the guests. You don’t have to know anything about how to manage the software. The difference as far as “turning on automated updates” and what your cloud provider does. Is that they manage the updates and have an entire team to test it.
Most of the services I named are just that services - you don’t even think about the underlying process.
It literally takes two clicks for instance to stand up a massively parallel data warehousing solution on AWS or an Hadoop cluster. It’s a few lines of yaml to set up most of it.
It didn’t take a “large number of people” to manage the software. It took two full time people - one in the US and one in India. For the most part, there is very little to manage or configure. Everything is provisioned with a set of yaml files.
Also, what happens when that one person gets hit by the lottery bus or goes on vacation?