Good point about people being expensive, doubly so in SF or Palo Alto.
That said, a small ops team (three people) can manage thousands of machines without much difficulty, and you can probably share two of those with the dev team as Dev-Ops guys, with one grizzled old sysadmin to handle the nastier problems.
I think that a lot of companies shy away from buying hardware for two reasons. One, because they haven't sat down and looked at the long-term ROI, and two, because for the past five years or so, every piece of IT media has talked about how stupid buying hardware is, and how we're all just going to go live in the cloud.
Sounds quite a bit like the NoSQL rhetoric, actually.
The reality is that at a certain scale, it's cheaper from a strategic and/or monetary standpoint to have in-house hardware.
Don't get me wrong -- there's definitely a big home in the ecosystem for cloud hosting. Probably less than ten percent of businesses need to buy their own hardware. But the ones that do, need dedicated hardware in a bad way.
<<That said, a small ops team (three people) can manage thousands of machines without much difficulty, and you can probably share two of those with the dev team as Dev-Ops guys, with one grizzled old sysadmin to handle the nastier problems.>>
I worked for a company that contracted with a guy whose entire business was based on this model. He was the hardcore sysadmin and would juggle tons of servers and administrative config for you. He trained the devs to handle all of the mundane ops stuff, with him as backup.
Really great system. It was really empowering for us devs, too.
I think as soon as you are starting for real-given the founder are hackers and will be doing most of the coding, a hardware solution amortized over a few years is the best solution.
That said, a small ops team (three people) can manage thousands of machines without much difficulty, and you can probably share two of those with the dev team as Dev-Ops guys, with one grizzled old sysadmin to handle the nastier problems.
I think that a lot of companies shy away from buying hardware for two reasons. One, because they haven't sat down and looked at the long-term ROI, and two, because for the past five years or so, every piece of IT media has talked about how stupid buying hardware is, and how we're all just going to go live in the cloud.
Sounds quite a bit like the NoSQL rhetoric, actually.
The reality is that at a certain scale, it's cheaper from a strategic and/or monetary standpoint to have in-house hardware.
Don't get me wrong -- there's definitely a big home in the ecosystem for cloud hosting. Probably less than ten percent of businesses need to buy their own hardware. But the ones that do, need dedicated hardware in a bad way.