"Vendor problems" is a red herring, IMO; you can have those in the cloud, too.
It's been my experience that those who can build good, reliable, high-quality systems, can do so either in the cloud or on-prem, generally with equal ability. It's just another platform to such people, and they will use it appropriately and as needed.
Those who can only make it work in the cloud are either building very simple systems (which is one place where the cloud can be appropriate), or are building a house of cards that will eventually collapse (or just cost them obscene amounts of money to keep on life support).
Engineering is engineering. Not everyone in the business does it, unfortunately.
Like everything, the cloud has its place -- but don't underestimate the number of decisions that get taken out of the hands of technical people by the business people who went golfing with their buddy yesterday. He just switched to Azure, and it made his accountants really happy!
The whole CapEx vs. OpEx issue drives me batty; it's the number one cause of cloud migrations in my career. For someone who feels like spent money should count as spent money regardless of the bucket it comes out of, this twists my brain in knots.
> or are building a house of cards that will eventually collapse (or just cost them obscene amounts of money to keep on life support)
Ding ding ding. It's this.
> The whole CapEx vs. OpEx issue drives me batty
Seconded. I can't help but feel like it's not just a "I don't understand money" thing, but more of a "the way Wall Street assigns value is fundamentally broken." Spending $100K now, once, vs. spending $25K/month indefinitely does not take a genius to figure out.
> Spending $100K now, once, vs. spending $25K/month indefinitely does not take a genius to figure out.
If you multiply your month payment for 1/i, where i is the interest rate your business can get, you will get how much of up-front money it's worth.
... that is, until next month, when the interest rate will change, a fact that always catches everyone by surprise, and you'll need to rush to fix your cash-flow.
So, yeah, I don't understand that either. Somehow, despite neither of us understanding how it can possibly work, it seems to fail to work empirically too, adding a huge amount of instability to companies.
That is, unless you decide to look at it from the perspective of executive bonuses, that are capped to 0, but can grow indefinitely. So instability is the point.
it's all about painting the right picture for your investors, so you make up shit and classify as cogs or opex depending on what is most beneficial for you in the moment
It's been my experience that those who can build good, reliable, high-quality systems, can do so either in the cloud or on-prem, generally with equal ability. It's just another platform to such people, and they will use it appropriately and as needed.
Those who can only make it work in the cloud are either building very simple systems (which is one place where the cloud can be appropriate), or are building a house of cards that will eventually collapse (or just cost them obscene amounts of money to keep on life support).
Engineering is engineering. Not everyone in the business does it, unfortunately.
Like everything, the cloud has its place -- but don't underestimate the number of decisions that get taken out of the hands of technical people by the business people who went golfing with their buddy yesterday. He just switched to Azure, and it made his accountants really happy!
The whole CapEx vs. OpEx issue drives me batty; it's the number one cause of cloud migrations in my career. For someone who feels like spent money should count as spent money regardless of the bucket it comes out of, this twists my brain in knots.
I'm clearly not a finance guy...