Well there is initial setup at the very least. Hooking up whatever landline the client has with the SaaS solution.
Then whenever a significant change is required, you need to call back your "expert". New location? xk$, etc.
But I think the biggest concern is that suddently the owner does not understand how his reversation system works. He used to be able to call Joe and know what's going on...
Ansible Tower lets you execute a playbook via a web GUI, and keeps a log of who executed what.
I'm not sure if it also shows some infrastructure graphs, but I'm talking about knowing if links are up, how they are firewalled, where the config for each thing is, etc.
When you host tens of services on hundreds of machines, this information is hard to get a grasp on, no matter what you do or how well you documented everything, because it takes a while to read through it.
Like many here, I keep it described in ansible and documentation inside a git repository.
But I feel like it's lacking. After a while you have so many ansible playbooks and roles that they cannot give you a birds-eye view anymore.
I think I would MUCH prefer to have some sort of HTML representation, where adding an instance/service starts by adding to that representation, and you could click on every link or node to show its golden image setup, ansible configuration, etc.
Unless something is keeping you there, just find a new job, here are some reasons:
- If you reach this situation, you're more competent than the rest of the group. Nobody to learn from, time to go.
- "Management" is a big machine, with its own insider culture and politics. It does not change overnight, do you want to wait 6 months minimum for things to get better?
- Changing job is good for just about everything: career, money, knowledge... as long as you don't do it too often.
- Meta-bonus: getting into a job with better peers means tighter work-friends. It's not fun to be around people overdesigning object-oriented projects when you understand functionnal programming and low-level debugging.
For me the logic is more like: get cheapers machines (be it in-house or with cheaper alternatives), that run kubernetes for example, and monitor them with Prometheus.
If you run out of capacity, defined by whatever metric you fancy from Prometheus, start EC2 machines for the burst.
I find that there is often a problem of quality in products advertised.
It may be products floating in Amazon searches because of fake reviews, sites with great SEO, and most ads online really.. none of those correlate to quality of product.
Then entire point was to make finding things easy, but I find that advertising just makes that harder.
In September I was looking for a Volleyball club in Paris for people in their 30s, as I wanted a fixed team with whom I'd share interests. My searches failed me horribly. Google and Duckduckgo mostly fed me news articles, competition stuff and some big club websites.
Then my local mayor's office site had a totally out of date page, and did not list clubs closeby but outside its district.
Eventually I went to a local sports fair to meet up with clubs, but almost none of them offered adults teams, because that's typically a young people's sport.
I the end, I did find a place for me, by talking to people at the mayor's office, and random players at the fair.
And often when I look for an object, it takes a very long time because quality products rarely float above the rest. It's excrutiating.
So now I hate advertising, and I hate ratings. They are noise designed to mess up with human psychology.
First of all, malicious developpers can still ask for unreasonable access and often do. How many times did you want to install an app and wonder why they ask for insane permissions like sending text messages.
You may be aware enough to refuse and uninstall at that point but that's not the case for everyone, and Apple washes their hands with this issue.
Furthermore, you may not allow such an app to access your privacy, but Apple itself is above the permission and will happily gather all kinds of data about you, with your implied consent (after all you DID buy a tapped piece of hardware). That's Siri and every remote Apple service for starters, and god knows what else in their closed source shiny software.
The random developer is the least of my concerns.
Now a truly open model where people can enforce torch apps cannot ask for ridiculous permissions, that's better. Enforced by enough parties that nobody can pull the blanket.
What I'm reading is that you like a process to be enforced to guarantee some level of quality, which is indeed something I like as well.
However I believe good package formats and OS-level checks can get us there without compromising my private informations to a third party in the process.
So you want to limit creativity and empower big companies even more by pushing forward walled gardens, because there are too many ads on the download page of one paint app out of a myriad?
Oh I did not mean AWS would suddently rise their pricing, just that servers may scale, but so does the cost of the service, and inflexion points may bite you.
Then, of course: "You're using the service wrong, silly, all you have to do is sign up for a few years to a bunch of our services".
proceeds...
Don't be fooled, AWS and the likes are very expensive, not as much as Heroku, but definitely more than OVH for example.
I am currently migrating a client's (valuable) production from AWS to OVH to divide their infrastructure cost by 3. Thankfully it did not depend on any non-OSS parts (RDS becomes a Postgres etc).
The question becomes: how far can you go with serverless until you have to move out, and then how much money was really saved once you paid the price of un-aws-ing?
The author of the article clearly spent quite a lot of human ressources and money to get his serverless setup running (hosted ES, Kibana, etc gets expensive fast).
In the end, I find it hard to believe that this is a real time saver, let alone a money saver, in fine.
Then whenever a significant change is required, you need to call back your "expert". New location? xk$, etc.
But I think the biggest concern is that suddently the owner does not understand how his reversation system works. He used to be able to call Joe and know what's going on...