> With on premise, you need someone that will install racks, change disks, setup high availability block storage or object storage, etc. Those are not DevOps people.

we have 7 racks and 3 people. The things you mentioned aren't even 5% of the workload.

There are things you figure out once, bake into automation, and just use.

You install server once and remove it after 5-10 years, depending on how you want to depreciate it. Drives die rarely enough it's like once every 2 months event at our size

The biggest expense is setting up automation (if I was re-doing our core infrastructure from scratch I'd probably need good 2 months of grind) but after that it's free sailing. Biggest disadvantage is "we need a bunch of compute, now", but depending on business that might never be a problem, and you have enough savings to overbuild a little and still be ahead. Or just get the temporary compute off cloud.

Moving around the physical hardware is a truly tiny part of the actual job, it's really not relevant. (especially nowadays, see the top level comment about how you can do an insane amount (probably more than the median cloud deployment) with a fraction of a rack).

To be clear, I'm not writing about on-premise. I mean difference between managed cloud and renting dedicated servers

"Those are not DevOps people."

Real Devops people are competent from physical layer to software layer.

Signed,

Aerospace Devop

People will install racks and swap drives for significantly less money than DevOps, lol. People who can build LEGO sets are cheaper than software developers.

Ops people are typically more useful given you probably already have devs.