It's surprising to me that people think they're spending a lot on infrastructure when they spend $800 on fonts, etc. When you drop the payment processor charges (which are per transaction) they're at $7k to run a site with a lot of functionality for a year. Seems pretty reasonable.
So, one $30-50k engineer gets split 5-10 ways on infrastructure. Most maintenance is automated with setup and occasionally fixing something using up most time. You usually negotiate 1 day to a week of dedicated time out of the month w/ split being flexible.
Heroku and Redis might still come out a better deal. It's just not going to be nearly as different as people think because one doesn't have to load-up on IT people to deploy or maintain common configurations. All kinds of consultants and smaller fish that will do it way cheaper [than you mentioned] with cost spread across multiple, small businesses.
- The time and money it takes to find said $30-50k engineer
- The risk (and therefore potential cost) if the engineer doesn't do the job correctly
- The unknown cost of "occasionally fixing" could be $50 or $50,000. Given how nebolus the DevOps position is, you also can't be sure the stuff this individual is doing is considered best practice.
- There is overhead time spent on managing such a resource (teleconferencing, IM's, etc)
- There is potential that the resource is unavailable and therefore a potential downtime that could cause your business loss
There's a reason Heroku exists and has been successful, and these are just a few of them.
But this one i would like to ask some questions about:
"The unknown cost of "occasionally fixing" could be $50 or $50,000. Given how nebolus the DevOps position is, you also can't be sure the stuff this individual is doing is considered best practice."
Who gets to decide what's best practice? How does such information about such best practice propagate? How much does it cost to acquire such best practice knowledge? Is trying to mitigate for this all the time a theoretical constraint on all possible solutions (i.e. without trying to mitigate for this, things will not work at all) or for any of the issues you bring up that are probably valid assumptions for some set of solutions?
- The time and money it takes to find and evaluate providers like Heroku
- The risk (and therefore potential cost) if the SaaS solution doesn't handle your needs as advertised
- Unknown costs that crop up both in paying the provider and handling stuff outside the provider.
- Overhead spent managing cloud applications
- Potential that local Internet or cloud startup experiences downtime.
There's a reason dedicated IT people exist and have been successful, and these are just a few of them.
I've seen a lot of people that hire devops in-house (technically, it's a little hard to see how "devops" might work with the "ops"-person just doing drive-by installation and maintenance once every month -- but I suppose if the "dev" part isn't "special" (web application server + database + static resources + database) one could argue there's not much need for "devops", just "ops"?).
Although 30k for full-time ops works sounds really low, anywhere? (As a customer, I'd probably prefer one tenth of a 100k/year engineer than one tenth of a 30k/year engineer... even if the price might be 3-4 times as high).