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Comment by kevindong | Hacker News Reader

IMO, the cloud providers' main advantage is that they will professionally manage all of the underlying hardware. Optionally, they can also manage the low level pieces of software also (e.g. databases, file store, etc.). It's a safe bet that GCP, AWS, Azure et al. can manage/architect their data center much better than the vast majority of companies.

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The last point is something that “we”, as an industry, can often be blind to.

If your business is something that is fundamentally not “pushing bytes”, you really, really don’t want to know about routers, firewalls, the OSI layer, SHA256, RAID arrays, all the way to this week’s JS framework. All of that is a big annoyance, and paying AWS to “take care of it” makes sense, even if it comes at a higher price: more often than not, the difference wouldn’t be offset by the time, effort, and risk exposure that you would have to allocate when building your own.

This calculation is different if your business is primarily digital. The gentleman upthread making a game, for example, is perfectly right: his company naturally developed a culture that can evaluate and manage every aspect of its digital operations, because it’s part of its core business, so it makes sense to put that knowledge to good use and save money.

But if you’re incompetent to that degree, AWS isn’t for you because you can’t even write software to run on it. You should be using a fully managed SaaS at that point.

In many cases yes, but there are shades of grey. Some systems cannot be shared, for whatever reason.

There are three things that make sense to me.

Firstly, if you are big enough, you can manage/architect your data centre better than a cloud provider. You can afford to hire staff to do it, and they can build something specific to your needs. Companies like this should be on-prem.

(It doesn't matter if the company is "digital" or not. It could be a huge retail chain, or a government agency, whatever. The only requirement is to be big enough that you have big needs and can afford a big spend on staff.)

Secondly, if you are small enough, you really, really don’t want to know about routers, firewalls, the OSI layer, SHA256, RAID arrays, etc. Dealing with that would mean another couple of full-time employees, and you can't afford that. Companies like this should be on a SaaS (ideally one less full of gotchas than Heroku).

Thirdly, if you are in between, you have the capacity to deal with system administration, there are some advantages to being able to shape your infrastructure to your needs, but you really don't want to get into real estate and millions of dollars of CAPEX. Companies like this should be on rented physical hardware.

What doesn't make sense, at any scale, is renting VMs.

Do you mean PaaS, not SaaS? What other good PaaS exist besides heroku?

I did mean PaaS, not Saas! Apologies, and thank you!

I wish i had a good answer about PaaS. There are hosted Cloud Foundry services. I think CF is more sensible than Heroku, myself. The various serverless platforms are PaaS of a specific kind. I think SalesForce counts. Is OpenShift still a thing?

> What doesn't make sense, at any scale, is renting VMs.

I disagree. The big cloud providers will let you rent VMs across multiple availability zones in a single geographic region. That gives you better redundancy than you could get by renting one or more dedicated servers in a single data center. Yes, those same cloud providers offer bare-metal instances, but those are absurdly expensive for a company that only needs small-scale computing power but still cares about uptime.

If you're small, you can get that redundancy on a PaaS. If you're big enough to move off a PaaS, you can rent physical machines in multiple datacentres.

Size is not the only thing that dictates whether one should use a PaaS. It's entirely possible for a tiny generalist team, or even a single developer, to develop an application whose requirements prevent it from running on a PaaS. But that doesn't mean the team or solo developer should have to handle all the hassles of operating physical servers. (Source: I was that solo developer for many years.)

I'm not super familiar with Heroku and similar platforms, but if I don't rent EC2s (which I take to mean what you meant by "VMs"), how do I host and serve bespoke backend components?

Even if all it does is suck data in, perform some computation, and send it off somewhere else - are you saying there are SAAS providers that are better equipped for this?

> Firstly, if you are big enough, you can manage/architect your data centre better than a cloud provider. You can afford to hire staff to do it, and they can build something specific to your needs. Companies like this should be on-prem.

It's interesting that competent engineers is only a question about cost to you. Where I am at (north of Europe) it's really hard to find good engineers. Even though it doesn't mean much about competence it's not mandatory for people in the IT industry to have a CS degree even if they're managing infrastructure in the cloud for millions every year.

I've been working in the industry at different companies for a bit over 10 years and I would say that a huge majority is just an average person who knows basic concepts about infrastructure but wouldn't be able to design and implement any of it by their own. This includes network infrastructure for the biggest ISPs in the country.

I work as a system engineer and the teams I've been working with the last 5 years, independent of company, have been looking for engineers constantly. The pay well and have great benefits but it's just not enough people out there to take these jobs and manage a full on-prem infrastructure.

So a part of the money you're talking about that should be used to hire all these really competent people are instead used to pay for cloud services where we know that professional people with far more hardware (and software) knowledge is managing the infrastructure. And this is really convenient for a lot of companies.

> The pay well and have great benefits but it's just not enough people out there to take these jobs and manage a full on-prem infrastructure.

I’m from a small province in Canada and we have similar problems here sometimes. One of the questions I sometimes have to ask clients when they make a statement like that is: “do you pay well for the area? Or do you pay well enough to attract talent from out-of-province?”

This often leads to them arguing that “but the cost of living is low here!” And inevitably I have to mention my friends who left the province to go to the Bay Area for 10 years and came back with $500k USD in stocks they collected, on top of what they had left over after paying their high cost-of-living rent.

I feel your pain. Companies running in less desirable areas have to somehow pay a premium for top tier talent. One way, as you mention, is to outsource, whether to cloud providers or part time contractors.

This isn’t meant as a brag at all, but I do the independent contractor thing here and make “pretty darned good for the area” money. Inevitably clients will ask me to come work full-time for them, and we have a painful conversation where I tell them what my taxable income was the year before, as well as the investments I made into equipment and licenses I use to provide the services I provide. The result so far has always been to continue being happy with me as a part-time contractor!

Edit: sorry for the typos, written on mobile with the swipe text thing

if it's ok to poke, can I ask what type of equipment and licenses? Is it like a home tech stack to test new infra setups on?

p.s hope you're staying safe from COVID

How much do you think a competent System engineer should be paid?

I think that's way too hard to answer since it depends on so many factors. But again, my experience isn't that the pay is too low. It's not like there are 10 people coming to the interview with no one taking the offer because of the salary. It's more like no one have applied for the job in three months and the external recruiters sniping LinkedIn didn't find anyone.

But to give some kind of estimate just so you know what page I'm at when I say they pay well I would say somewhere between $60-75k.

too low.

So I checked on glassdoor, which is known to lowball tech wages, for Washington D.C. So It isn't NY or Silicon Valley/Forest. The Median wage for a System engineer is 182K USD. At the current conversion rate that is 167.7K Euro. Unfortunately, that's your problem.

The cloud providers' main advantage when you're unicorn scale is their engineering team acts as an extension of yours. We regularly hop on calls with AWS to scope out features for them to build for us. Our parent org can pretty much snap their fingers and Google will dispatch their engineers to fix/build whatever they wanted.

That and very preferential pricing.

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