I think you had great boss (assuming he did not start timer each time you stopped typing on keyboard). Those endless meetings become unproductive pretty fast. I suspect that in big part they become a self sustained cancer used to justify time and salaries of unproductive company members.
As for the subject itself: frankly I do not see any advantage of hosting on say Azure over hosting myself. Either requires a good deal of maintenance. And no you can not really rely on Azure doing it for you.
Uptime for me is probably just as good on my servers as each one I have in my office also has ready to use up to date shadow copy located elsewhere. Azure is way more expensive of course.
The amount of hardware/processing power I have on my own server would cost me a fortune to have on Azure. Scalability does not matter much either because:
I am not Google and do not have to serve the rest of the world.
On top of that my servers are usually high performance native C++ applications that can handle thousands of requests per second sustainably and without breaking a sweat.
Vertical scalability with modern CPUs and multilevel storage is absolutely insane.
> frankly I do not see any advantage of hosting on say Azure over hosting myself.
In my opinion, cloud hosting only makes sense if your systems are architectured around being hosted on the cloud.
If you can build your application in such a way that it runs in the free tier of serverless, then it's going to be considerably more cost effective than renting a dedicated server - but if you can't, then it absolutely won't be.
>"If you can build your application in such a way that it runs in the free tier of serverless"
Serverless - that would be vendor/architectural trap. Besides free tier does not come anywhere close to be able to serve my applications. They serve real medium/big size businesses.
You mentioned serverless and architecting for it. I consider it vendor and technological lock in with no benefits. You might have a different opinion but to each their own.
You also mentioned free tier. To me it is irrelevant as the amount of resources it gives is useless for me.
You seem to want me to defend Azure, but you're the one that brought it up. I have no prescriptive views on how to host things.
The only thing I can really offer you is that in the spirit of this article, when I did some work that would run on AWS lambda it was very handy not to have to think about any of the infrastructure that was around the business logic I needed to code.
I fully expect that code will spend its entire useful lifetime running in AWS Lambda with no need for it to escape the vendor or technology behind it. It's even possible no one will think about it until it breaks and stops sending events.
If it costs the company £50/hour for me to look into something, me being able to complete a task quickly and then never look into it again is almost certainly going to save more money than writing a dedicated process and running it on a physical server that I then need to maintain.
As for the subject itself: frankly I do not see any advantage of hosting on say Azure over hosting myself. Either requires a good deal of maintenance. And no you can not really rely on Azure doing it for you.
Uptime for me is probably just as good on my servers as each one I have in my office also has ready to use up to date shadow copy located elsewhere. Azure is way more expensive of course.
The amount of hardware/processing power I have on my own server would cost me a fortune to have on Azure. Scalability does not matter much either because:
I am not Google and do not have to serve the rest of the world.
On top of that my servers are usually high performance native C++ applications that can handle thousands of requests per second sustainably and without breaking a sweat.
Vertical scalability with modern CPUs and multilevel storage is absolutely insane.