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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

I have a theory that this is why the cloud is popular with big businesses.

Every big business has an in-house data centre, which is operated as a cost centre; success, for a cost centre, means delivering service as cheaply as possible. Providing an easy way for developers to spin up new databases? That would practically be an invitation to increase costs - it's the last thing they should be doing!

So when a developer from that big corporation uses AWS and encounters an environment that makes it easy for them to spin up a new database, it's a big productivity increase.

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I absolutely understand why in-house IT and dev folks like it: It literally removes the ability for budgeting people to tell them no. And the cost of new uses starts small and is granular, so by the time finance folks see it, it's already done and a critical component and no longer optional.

It literally removes agency from financial folks and gives it to tech people.

This is good and bad. It's good if you have competent tech staff. Right now my org is battling for basic resources like gsuite and okta licenses for their new hires because the CFO is complaining. It's absurd.

If you have competent tech staff you can inhouse it on any of a dozen hypervisors for roughly the capital cost you would spend in 6 months on cloud.

Every year on the cloud can roughly cover the expense for double that capacity deployed on prem.

Complaints of "operational costs" generally assume a woefully incompetent staff.

This has happened before as a tech manager in different companies. When looking to implement some new technology (say, a new Cassandra like database) I have two options: either a) I choose ScyllaDB, and have to go through all the "additional vendor" internal process, that with ISO27001 gets terribly bureaucratic; or b) I start using DynamoDB or Keyspaces transparently and let the current AWS bill increase.

For me it has always been a no brainer to avoid the bureaucratic pain.

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