this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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This hits the nail right on the head. The point of cloud services is to take away all the overheads of building and delivering software solutions that have nothing to do with the actual business problem I'm trying to solve.
If I want to get a new product to market, I want to spend most of my time making my core product better, more marketable, more efficient. I don't want to divert time and resources to just keep the lights on, like having to hire a whole bunch of people whose only jobs is to provision and manage servers and IT infrastructure (or nurse a Kubernetes cluster for that matter). Managing Kubernetes or physical tin servers is not what my business is about. All this tech infrastructure is a means to an end, not the end itself.
That's why cloud services is such a cost efficient proposition for 98% businesses. Hell, if I could run everything using a serverless model (not always possible or cost effective) I'd do it gladly.
This is quite a trite argument from my point of view. Also, this is from the perspective of the business, which I don't particularly care about, and I tend to look from the perspective of the worker.
Additionally, the cloud allows to scale quickly, but the fact that it allows to delegate everything is a myth. It's so much a myth that you see companies running fully on cloud with an army on people in platform teams and additionally you get finops teams, entire teams whose job is optimizing the spend of cloud. Sure, when you start out it's 100% reasonable to use cloud services, but in the medium-long term, it's an incredibly poor investment, because you still need people to administer the cloud plus, you need to pay a huge premium for the services you buy, which your workforce now can't manage or build anymore. This means you still pay people to do work which is not your core business, but now they babysit cloud services instead of the actual infra, and you are paying twice.
Cloud exploded during the times of easy money at no interest, where startups had to build some stuff, IPO and then explode without ever turning a single dollar of profit. It's a model that fits perfect in that context.
At least where I work, our cloud team is ~35 people who manage the whole thing.
The datacenter team? In the hundreds.
Cloud is not the answer to every infra problem, but the flexibility, time to market, and lifecycle burden are easily beneficial weighed against finops. I’m an Azure engineer myself, it’s no comparison the benefits to a managed solution vs rolling your own DC for a lot of regular business workloads and solutions. Beyond that personally I’ve been able to skill up in areas I wouldn’t be able to otherwise if I was stuck troubleshooting bad cables, rebuilding a dead RAID array, or planning VMWare scaling nonsense.
But those are absolutely not the only 2 levels. Server rental can be managed easily by the same infra team who manages the cloud, for a fraction of cost.
I will say more, the same exact team that spends time managing EKS clusters could manage self-managed clusters and have money to spare for additional hires.
Your suggestions is a large expansion of skillset needed for your alternative to the cloud solution. Your own experience in attempting to hire workers should point to the reason thats a bad idea. You're going to need even higher skilled people, and they are going to ask for significantly more money.
I wouldn't say it's a large expansion of skillset, meaning it's not massive. But yes, indeed it is problematic to find people. It is because this is a vicious circle in which companies are digging their own graves by eliminating a market for those people, which in turn means that those who would want to hire some can't find them easily, leading to outsourcing instead. Do this for 15 years across the whole industry and it stops being an option, which is pretty much where we are today. That said, training and upskilling is always a possibility for companies who invest on their own employees and are playing the long game...