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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

> The only real tangible benefit to cloud that I've seen is that a team can instantly provision hardware, database, etc. resources without much planning. That's it. And is that worth it? (I don't really think so.)

Yes! Maybe not for you or me, but it’s definitely worth it to tons of organizations where everyone including engineering was beholden to old school IT departments that take months to spin up a VM after pages of bureaucratic back and forth. The cloud moves it from an IT issue to department budgeting.

The other advantage of cloud was moving capex to opex which the finance people liked because *hand wave* something about amortization. Those are the two reasons most established companies moved to the cloud. It had little to do with the actual cost but how it was spent and who was in charge of doing it.

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Having seen the results of everyone being able to spin up a VM (or an EMR cluster, or an EKS cluster) I can say a little more bureaucracy is probably a good thing.

You end up wasting huge amounts of money on resources that are just sitting around idle (no your fancy automation to shut them down won't work because maybe that dev cluster is actually needed at 2am on Sunday. It's an org problem, not a technical problem).

But more importantly you give the cloud providers an excuse to destroy another square mile of pristine forest and build a giant 4 story grey box that wastes enormous amounts of already limited water and energy.

  where everyone including engineering was beholden to old school IT departments that take months to spin up a VM after pages of bureaucratic back and forth. The cloud moves it from an IT issue to department budgeting.

My F500 company put a stop to that. There is new paperwork in place to requisition cloud resources. The bureaucracy will not be replaced.

Even the startup I worked at in my last job didn't let people just spin up whatever resources they felt like in AWS. Changes had to go through architecture/security review, and I might have been the only SDE who was allowed to log into AWS at all. We were subject to SOC 2, but I imagine it's relatively common for SaaS companies to have some kind of compliance framework assuming they want F500s as customers?

> old school IT departments that take months to spin up a VM after pages of bureaucratic back and forth.

Virtual machines were the bureaucracy shortcut. People sounded exactly like you. In fact, you can go back about 30 or 40 years and each decade people said the same type of thing. E.g.:

"What's great about a mainframe logical partition is that we don't have to do a year of paperwork to get our own mainframe."

"What's great about Intel servers is that we don't have to beg IT for a mainframe LPAR."

"What's great about virtual machines is we don't have to... "

"What's great about the cloud is we don't..."

"What's great about SaaS is..." <- You are here.

PS: There's products starting appear in the market that "firewall" SaaS products to stop people like you. Not the hackers. You!

The bureaucracy will not be side-stepped.

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