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m0le t1_jdpt1nj wrote

Reply to comment by thunder_struck85 in ELI5 How does a “website” have so many employees? by [deleted]

The hardware maintenance costs have been the least of your problems as an IT department for a very long time. You could bung off the shelf servers into colo racks and basically forget about them. All moving to the cloud has done is replace the emergency alert from your colo provider with a "the cloud is experiencing issues" message from your cloud provider (reliability and resilience may well have significantly improved, or may not depending on your cloud provider). Yes, you don't have to plan for new hardware every few years, but the cost of the that is small next to the cost of renting compute from the big cloud vendors. Even the dedicated staff planning out your hardware strategy have not gone anywhere, they've just become the staff planning cloud strategy.

Maintenance of the software has always been the biggest pain in the arse, and that is usually not particularly outsourcable.

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50MillionChickens t1_jdpymr1 wrote

I have 30 years in the industry on both sides of this and radically disagree with this. Cloud computing is not free in money or service but it has fundamentally reduced tech and HR and service costs over the pre-cloud years when you had whole teams devoted to nothing but running a server farm, managing hardware, environments, cables, connections, internal networks, comms and goddamn telephonic.

Cloud computing changed all of that. Sure, the BiG Box hosts still have their centers to manage and your tech team needs Cloud expertise. But outsourcing the hardware and 90% of networking issues has made IT a much better management environment for the end user.

It's much less of a wild west week out there for tech teams. Now, just don't go unplugging those mega centers and we'll be fine. :-)

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thunder_struck85 t1_jdqigc2 wrote

No, they have not been the "least of your problems". It's actually a big problem especially for a lot of legacy applications running on ancient stuff like mainframes that companies often had to hire special staff to keep running.

Migrating to the cloud has solved so many of those problems.

Of course it has created new ones, but that's not the scope of this discussion. This discussion was about maintaining hardware only. Not cost.

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m0le t1_jdqj6oc wrote

Converting mainframe stuff to cloud is... nontrivial at best. If it were easy, it'd be off the mainframe and on something cheaper, because MIPS are horrifyingly expensive on every mainframe I've used. I've worked a lot on really legacy hardware (everything from a VAX cluster that's still in production to this day through Tandem nonstops to relatively recent IBM Z series stuff) and shifting loads to standard x86 hardware is never straightforward.

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thunder_struck85 t1_jdqkkdv wrote

Again, you continue to confuse separate issues as one issue. Whether it is trivial or inexpensive or difficult is completely irrelevant to the discussion that spawned this comment chain.

The discussion that spawned this comment chain was simply hardware maintenance in the cloud. And the answer is there is none. You pay a premium to have someone do that for you. That's it.

Everything else is a completely different discussion

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