Thanks for the detailed reply, I found it very informative. I work on a small team developing 'private cloud' infrastructure for a large company, so I usually find myself on the opposite side of the arguement... trying to highlight the virtues of on-prem hardware and the downsides of 3rd party cloud providers.
We've had to work very hard to allow for developers/sre/ops folks to be able provision vms and bare-metal machines in our datacenters the same way they would in the cloud provider that we use. Obviously its not as fast, seamless or feature-rich as it is with aws/gcp/azure et al, but I'm proud of the progress we've made.
What really kills me though, is that a huge chunk of our engineers seem to think our work is a complete waste of time in the first place. We have several physical dcs, and tens of thousands of machines... but since most engineers don't have to think about costs, or about workloads other than their own, they think of us as out of touch and clinging to the past.
Nothing worse than getting snark about our platform from an SRE who spends their days in a web app glueing together the ready made services of google and amazon while acting as if they're building the world of tomorrow :)
Wow, sounds like really challenging work. I still think those skills will be valuable for a long time, especially since they are becoming more rare. I'm curious how you prepared for that job, did a specific degree help? I have only learned what was necessary to solve the problems I've been given, and picked things up from others on the job.
We've had to work very hard to allow for developers/sre/ops folks to be able provision vms and bare-metal machines in our datacenters the same way they would in the cloud provider that we use. Obviously its not as fast, seamless or feature-rich as it is with aws/gcp/azure et al, but I'm proud of the progress we've made.
What really kills me though, is that a huge chunk of our engineers seem to think our work is a complete waste of time in the first place. We have several physical dcs, and tens of thousands of machines... but since most engineers don't have to think about costs, or about workloads other than their own, they think of us as out of touch and clinging to the past.
Nothing worse than getting snark about our platform from an SRE who spends their days in a web app glueing together the ready made services of google and amazon while acting as if they're building the world of tomorrow :)