It's interesting to think about the process that lead to this: "its just money, devs time costs more.. do what you gotta do"
Are cloud vendor salesmen doing jedi mind tricks? Or are these decisions just made by incompetent people? Who researches this kind of stuff? It's some kind of a management trends history subject.
There’s also a lot of politics around OpEx vs capitalEx.
In prior firms we’d have to go hat-in-hand for $3M of hardware every 3 years on an upgrade cycle. Of course few were around long enough to be on the requesting or approving side of this upgrade cycle and it would drag out painfully. Sometimes we’d try to get creative and go more just-in-time and come back for $500K every 6 months but the pain would just be more frequent.
On the other hand, $150k/mo slowly growing adds up to more in the longterm, but no senior manager ever has to approve a single $500K-$3M purchase request.
Depends on where the budgets go - salary goes into something they have to answer for - "cloud infrastructure" goes elsewhere in the budget they don't have to answer for.
There's also the thousand cuts - if you want a big server, you will have to do lots of discussion and arguing about the cost there of, but if instead you're adding a small monthly cost, the arguing isn't as much.
You keep doing that and suddenly someone notices that half the budget is AWS, at which point the "move onsite" dance begins (until the next time the big server argument happens).
I think Elon Musk got technically demoted but at any rate shuffled around for wanting to use Microsoft for the servers, Paypal ended up using Unix instead.
Are cloud vendor salesmen doing jedi mind tricks? Or are these decisions just made by incompetent people? Who researches this kind of stuff? It's some kind of a management trends history subject.