Use One Big Server (2022)

Bare-metal servers sound super cheap when you look at the price tag, and yeah, you get a lot of raw power for the money. But once you’re in an enterprise setup, the real cost isn’t the hardware at all, it’s the people needed to keep everything running.

If you go this route, you’ve got to build out your own stack for security, global delivery, databases, storage, orchestration, networking ... the whole deal. That means juggling a bunch of different tools, patching stuff, fixing breakage at 3 a.m., and scaling it all when things grow. Pretty soon you need way more engineers, and the “cheap” servers don’t feel so cheap anymore.

I used to say "oh yeah just run qemu-kvm" until my girlfriend moved in with me and I realized you do legitimately need some kind of infrastructure for managing your "internal cloud" if anyone involved isn't 100% on the same page and then that starts to be its own thing you really do have to manage.

Suddenly I learned why my employer was willing to spend so much on OpenStack and Active directory.