Core density plus power makes so many things worthwhile. Generally human cost of managing hardware scales with number of components under management. CPUs very reliable. So once you get lots of CPU and RAM on single machine you can run with very few.

But right pricing hardware is hard if you’re small shop. My mind is hard-locked onto Epyc processors without thought. 9755 on eBay is cheap as balls. Infinity cores!

Problem with hardware is lead time etc. cloud can spin up immediately. Great for experimentation. Organizationally useful. If your teams have to go through IT to provision machine and IT have to go through finance so that spend is reliable, everybody slows down too much. You can’t just spin up next product.

But if you’re small shop having some Kubernetes on rack is maybe $15k one time and $1.2k on going per month. Very cheap and you get lots and lots of compute!

Previously skillset was required. These days you plug Ethernet port, turn on Claude Code dangerously skip permissions “write a bash script that is idempotent that configures my Mikrotik CCR, it’s on IP $x on interface $y”. Hotspot on. Cold air blowing on face from overhead coolers. 5 minutes later run script without looking. Everything comes up.

Still, foolish to do on prem by default perhaps (now that I think about it): if you have cloud egress you’re dead, compliance story requires interconnect to be well designed. More complicated than just basics. You need to know a little before it makes sense.

Feel like reasoning LLM. I now have opposite position.

> Previously skillset was required. These days you plug Ethernet port, turn on Claude Code dangerously skip permissions “write a bash script that is idempotent that configures my Mikrotik CCR, it’s on IP $x on interface $y”. Hotspot on. Cold air blowing on face from overhead coolers. 5 minutes later run script without looking. Everything comes up.

Last time I tried to do anything networking with Claude it set up route preference in opposite order (it thought lower number means more preferred, while it was opposite), fucking it up completely, and then invented config commands that do not exist in BIRD (routing software suite).

Then I looked at 2 different AIs and they both hallucinated same BIRD config commands that were nonexistent. And by same I mean they hallucinated existence of same feature.

> If your teams have to go through IT to provision machine and IT have to go through finance so that spend is reliable, everybody slows down too much. You can’t just spin up next product.

The time of having to order a bunch of servers for new project is long over. We just spun k8s cluster for devs to self-service themselves and the prod clusters just have a bit of accounting shim so adding new namespace have to be assigned to a certain project so we can bill client for it.

Also you're allowed to use cloud services while you have on-prem infrastructure. You get best of both, with some cognition cost involved.