Well, not really. If you are using a cloud solution, you usually needs an engineer that knows this particular solution. Outside of the HN bubble, it's a rare breed and it cost a lot more than your traditional linux admin, that you probably already have anyway.
Then you need to design, maintain and debug the distributed cloud system, which is more complex.
So you'll have a dedicated person or team for that in both cases.
On the other end, setuping a linux box for the common tasks (web server, cache, db, etc) never takes me more than a day.
> Outside of the HN bubble, it's a rare breed and it cost a lot more than your traditional linux admin, that you probably already have anyway.
Strongly disagree. It's much easier to find people with experience deploying to particular cloud services than it is to find someone who knows how to setup, managed, and maintain a bare metal Linux system from scratch. It's also much easier to teach a cloud solution than to teach someone everything to know about bootstrapping and maintaining Linux servers in a safe and secure manner.
> On the other end, setuping a linux box for the common tasks (web server, cache, db, etc) never takes me more than a day.
That's ignoring all of the future overhead of maintaining it and keeping up with updates. Not to mention the required documentation and knowledge sharing to help others understand your custom system so the bus factor isn't 1.
It's always easy to get started with one-off systems, but that's missing the bulk of the work.
Kinda playing the devil’s advocate, but cloud solution aren’t inherently more complex than administrating a traditional linux.
Thinking of securing the OS, configuring a deploy mechanism, managing updates, dealing with lib compatibilities once you have more than 1 app running, etc. That’s a pretty vast and deep set of skills needed.
You assume there is already one of such admin in the company, but going cloud first reduce all of the above to Docker/container knowledge, and understanding cloud configurations, which can go from a heroku setup, a GCE set of instances up to a small GKE cluster. You can introduce as much complexity as you are comfortable with.
Then you need to design, maintain and debug the distributed cloud system, which is more complex.
So you'll have a dedicated person or team for that in both cases.
On the other end, setuping a linux box for the common tasks (web server, cache, db, etc) never takes me more than a day.