We have 7 racks, 3 people and actual hardware stuff is minuscule part of that. Few hundred VMs, anything from "just a software running on server" to k8s stack (biggest one is 30 nodes), 2 ceph cluster (our and clients), and a bunch of other shit
The stuff you mentioned is, amortized, around 20% (automation ftw). The rest of it is stuff that we would do in cloud anyway and cloud is in general harder to debug too (we have few smaller projects managed in cloud for customers.
We did calculation to move to cloud few times now, never was even close to profotable and we woudn't save on manpower anyway as 24/7 on-call is still required.
So I call bullshit on that.
If you are startup, by all means go cloud
If you are small, go ahead, not worth it.
If you have spiky load, cloud or hybrid will most likely be cheaper.
But if you have constant (by that I mean difference between peak and lowest traffic is "only" like 50-60%) load and need a bunch of servers to run it (say 3+ racks), it might actually be cheaper on-site.
Or a bunch of dedicated servers. Then you don't need to bother to manage hardware, and in case of boom can even scale relatively quickly
The stuff you mentioned is, amortized, around 20% (automation ftw). The rest of it is stuff that we would do in cloud anyway and cloud is in general harder to debug too (we have few smaller projects managed in cloud for customers.
We did calculation to move to cloud few times now, never was even close to profotable and we woudn't save on manpower anyway as 24/7 on-call is still required.
So I call bullshit on that.
If you are startup, by all means go cloud
If you are small, go ahead, not worth it.
If you have spiky load, cloud or hybrid will most likely be cheaper.
But if you have constant (by that I mean difference between peak and lowest traffic is "only" like 50-60%) load and need a bunch of servers to run it (say 3+ racks), it might actually be cheaper on-site.
Or a bunch of dedicated servers. Then you don't need to bother to manage hardware, and in case of boom can even scale relatively quickly