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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> and most importantly doing this before spending half a million/year on AWS

AWS is... incentivizing scope creep, to put it mildly. In ye olde days, you had your ESXi blades, and if you were lucky some decent storage attached to it, and you gotta made do with what you had - if you needed more resources, you'd have to go through the entire usual corporate bullshit. Get quotes from at least three comparable vendors, line up contract details, POs, get approval from multiple levels...

Now? Who cares if you spin up entire servers worth of instances for feature branch environments, and look, isn't that new AI chatbot something we could use... you get the idea. The reason why cloud (not just AWS) is so popular in corporate hellscapes is because it eliminates a lot of the busybody impeders. Shadow IT as a Service.

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Those busybodies are also there to keep rogue engineers from burning money on useless features (like AI chat bots) that only serve to bolster their promo packet...

That depends on how the incentive structures for your corporate purchase department are set up - and there's really a ton of variance there, with results ranging from everyone being happy in the best case to frustrated employees quitting in droves or the company getting burned at employer rating portals.

> That depends on how the incentive structures for your corporate purchase department are set up

Sure, but that seems orthogonal to the pros and cons of having more layers of oversight (busybodies, to use your term) on infra spend. Badly run companies are badly run, and I don't think having the increased flexibility that comes from cloud providers changes that.

I literally started laughing at this. I worked at a bare-metal shop fairly recently and a guy on my team used a corporate credit card to set up an AWS account and create an AI chatbot.

The dude nearly got fired, but your comment hit the spot. You made my night, thank you.

> keep rogue engineers from burning money on useless features (like AI chat bots)

As someone who has worked on an AI chat bot I can assure you it does not come from engineers.

It's coming from the CFO who is salivating at the thought of downsizing their customer support team.

The other reply in this thread might beg to differ: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38295849

I think the reality is no discipline, be it Engineering, Product or Finance, is immune to flights of fancy.

So instead of using 500k of engineering time when you need more resources, you're now saving 50k of AWS overspend.

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