How many ops employees would you need for a fleet of 500 servers in a datacenter? We managed it all with 4 people with AWS.
This could be a false dichotomy. Just because a service with AWS uses so many servers doesn't mean a more monolithic system would need as many.
We did talks with one of our competitors (before they were a competitor). We mentioned that we ran our infrastructure on 4 large VM hosts (with a light density of 3-4 VMs per host). They were shocked. They were currently running over a hundred EC2 instances, with the relevant satellite services. They literally could not believe that we could provide a comparable service without reliance on something like AWS.
It's amazing what an be done with the right knowledge. In our case, myself and one of my coworkers maintain our infrastructure at something like 4-6 hours per week total (mostly patching, reviewing logs, etc). We both have previous networking, hardware, and software experience. When we do major upgrades (about every 2 years), it takes one of us about a week to source the hardware, get it loaded in to the rack, and turned on. Then we migrate guests over and we're done. This doesn't even get in to the cost savings on running on our own hardware vs AWS pricing.
We run about a hundred servers (soon to be lots more) with a part time staff of 3 (as in, we all do dev work most of the time). It used to be mostly me for ages, but we got big enough that I got promoted out of most of the day-to-day stuff.
All own hardware, and having just had a reboot on Softlayer's schedule to fix the Xen issue for a separate project we're running on their gear - being able to schedule your own maintenance windows is so much nicer. We spend less time dealing with problems on our own hardware than we do dealing with cloud providers having issues.
This could be a false dichotomy. Just because a service with AWS uses so many servers doesn't mean a more monolithic system would need as many.
We did talks with one of our competitors (before they were a competitor). We mentioned that we ran our infrastructure on 4 large VM hosts (with a light density of 3-4 VMs per host). They were shocked. They were currently running over a hundred EC2 instances, with the relevant satellite services. They literally could not believe that we could provide a comparable service without reliance on something like AWS.
It's amazing what an be done with the right knowledge. In our case, myself and one of my coworkers maintain our infrastructure at something like 4-6 hours per week total (mostly patching, reviewing logs, etc). We both have previous networking, hardware, and software experience. When we do major upgrades (about every 2 years), it takes one of us about a week to source the hardware, get it loaded in to the rack, and turned on. Then we migrate guests over and we're done. This doesn't even get in to the cost savings on running on our own hardware vs AWS pricing.