This was one of the coolest job ads that I've ever read :). Congrats for what you have done with your infrastructure, team and product!

You can also buy the hardware and hire an IT vendor to rack and help manage it as smart hands so you never need to visit the datacenter. With modern beefy hardware, even large web services only need a few racks so most orgs don't even to manage a large footprint.

Sure you have to schedule your own hardware repairs or updates but it also means you don't need to wrangle with the ridiculous cost-engineering, reserved instances, cloud product support issues or API deprecations, proprietary configuration languages, etc.

Bare metal is better for a lot of non-cost reasons too, as the article notes it's just easier/better to reason about the lower level primitives and you get more reliable and repeatable performance.

> Cloud companies generally make onboarding very easy, and offboarding very difficult.

I reckon most on-prem deployments have significantly worse offboarding than the cloud providers. As a cloud provider you can win business by having something for offboarding, but internally you'd never get buy-in to spend on a backup plan if you decide to move to the cloud.

This makes sense for HPC and ML workloads. Big batch jobs where you are pushing the hardware and having everything local is a clear advantage. Also this company sells hardware so it makes sense for them to have hardware experience. Still think that for the majority on here, needing to make a physical phone call to their data center team (!!) to rack a server is a nutty proposition. You think the AWS api is slow? Trying calling Steve. If you have fixed compute costs after a year, sure, look at pulling some stuff on prem.

The #1 reason I would advocate for using AWS today is the compliance package they bring to the party. No other cloud provider has anything remotely like Artifact. I can pull Amazon's PCI-DSS compliance documentation using an API call. If you have a heavily regulated business (or work with customers who do), AWS is hard to beat.

If you don't have any kind of serious compliance requirement, using Amazon is probably not ideal. I would say that Azure AD is ok too if you have to do Microsoft stuff, but I'd never host an actual VM on that cloud.

Compliance and "Microsoft stuff" covers a lot of real world businesses. Going on prem should only be done if it's actually going to make your life easier. If you have to replicate all of Azure AD or Route53, it might be better to just use the cloud offerings.

Not nearly on the article's level, but I've been operating what I call a fog machine (itsy bitsy personal cloud) for about 15 years. It's just a bunch of local and off-site NAS boxes. It has kinda worked out great. Mostly Synology, but probably won't be when their scheduled retirement comes up. The networking is dead simple, the power use is distributed, and the size of it all is still a monster for me - back in the day, I had to use it for a very large audio project to keep backups of something like 750,000 albums and other audio recordings along with their metadata and assets.

The company I work for used to have a hybrid where 95% was on-prem, but became closer to 90% in the cloud when it became more expensive to do on-prem because of VMware licensing. There are alternatives to VMware, but not officially supported with our hardware configuration, so the switch requires changing all the hardware, which still drives it higher than the cloud. Almost everything we have is cloud agnostic, and for anything that requires resilience, it sits in two different providers.

Now the company is looking at doing further cost savings as the buildings rented for running on-prem are sitting mostly unused, but also the prices of buildings have gone up in recent years, notably too, so we're likely to be saving money moving into the cloud. This is likely to make the cloud transition permanent.

15-years ago or so a spreadsheet was floating around where you could enter server costs, compute power, etc and it would tell you when you would break-even by buying instead of going with AWS. I think it was leaked from Amazon because it was always three-years to break-even even as hardware changed over time.

There's the HN I know and love

Counterpoint: "Why I'm Selling All My GPUs" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6mu2QRVNSE

TL;DW: GPU rental arbitrage is dead. Regulation hell. GPU prices. Rental price erosion. Building costs rising. Complexity of things like backup power. Delays of connection to energy grid. Staffing costs.