Yep! And it takes time and effort to maintain your Puppet/Chef/Ansible/Terraform/OpenTofu scripts as well as your golden images as well as triaging escalations as well as other incidental work. This means you don't have as much time to work on tuning or debugging, because you'll have dozens of tools (some in-house, others purchased) to manage.

Furthermore, most people recognize Hardware specialized IT Administration is increasingly a career dead end, so most end up switching to Engineering, Sales Engineering, or Support Engineering due to better career opportunities.

> I would be shocked if Oracle support (or any other vendor) is given login access to make changes on servers owned by clients. At best, you open a case, you get an incompetent support person who'll send you documentation.

This is the norm in most mid- and upper-market support contracts. You'll have a dedicated TAM, Support Eng, and CSM who will handhold teams, and will have access to the underlying infrastructure.

> Oracle support does not replace admins. Oracle support gives you access to bug fixes, updates, documentation. I believe you can download most Oracle software for free, but without the docs and updates, its worthless. Other vendors may use the opposite strategy, docs openly available but software downloads are paid/subscriptions.

Depending on your contract, you would be given a dedicated TAM team and support team to debug any issues in the Oracle stack.

> In reality though, there will always be admins, then a whole lot DevOps/Cloud Ops/Kubernetes/SRE/etc people added, smooth talking manager/director increasing the spend from what could be done on bare-metal under 20K to a 20 million dollar multi cloud strategy. Why have 3 admins report to you, when you can have an army of 200 people do the same work for 100x more cost? Success stories and promotions all around!

That "smooth-talking manager" needs to justify to the CFO, COO, CTO, VP Eng, etc that for $X spent, I can get 1.5 * $X back.

As I've mentioned on multiple different occasions on HN, spend on on-prem infra is treated as part of the Finance+ITOps budget, not the DevOps budget (which is generally within R&D).

Procurement is hard, and you need to JUSTIFY a 1% increase in headcount

For example, let's assume you are hiring 3 IT Admins for $120k. That ends up costing $700-800k/yr because of benefits and incidentals. The compute as well is an additional $200-300k.

This means you are spending $900k/yr AT BEST.

That $200-300k in compute becomes $500k with a support contract, and you can hire 1 person for $120k to manage that.

This means you're spending around $750k/yr AT BEST.

That extra $150K can then be given to Engineering to help give bonuses to attract good dev talent or hire some additional headcount on the Sales side to sell the product you are hired to build.