In the mid-1990s a large ISP I am aware of, rented "pizzabox" and larger Sun SPARC systems (like SPARCstation 2s; but even the larger systems ran the same OS) to corporate clients.
The team of 5 sysadmins setup, installed, secured and managed 2000 such systems, mostly running SunOS 4.1.x , which didn't have nearly the automation that we have now on newer Unix based OSes.
Using only the bash shell and the many scripts they wrote for managing them. Guess the profitability of that kind of setup? 1 sysadmin per 400 systems... the kind of overhead people think exists, doesn't.
Wouldn't it still be 1 sysadmin per 5 systems instead of 400? It's not like you can hire 1.25% of a sysadmin directly, while on AWS you can you just pay a significant premium.
The team of 5 sysadmins setup, installed, secured and managed 2000 such systems, mostly running SunOS 4.1.x , which didn't have nearly the automation that we have now on newer Unix based OSes.
Using only the bash shell and the many scripts they wrote for managing them. Guess the profitability of that kind of setup? 1 sysadmin per 400 systems... the kind of overhead people think exists, doesn't.