> If you are a 50 year old Fortune500 that was cargo culted into "we must migrate to cloud", it turns out that lift-and-shift to VMs is hideously expensive. But also, re-architecting 50 years of internal software is also hideously expensive.

One underappreciated aspect of this is that it really isn't possible to control cloud costs in a large enough enterprise even aside from the costs of running your actual applications.

You can have all the tagging and chargeback and finops as you want but at the end of the day trying to manage cloud costs is a losing battle.

Not only do you have the costs of running the applications you actually need which are far beyond the costs to run them on prem because suddenly your app that could run on a single server is running on a 12 node EKS cluster spread across several AZs. You also have the additional costs of all the additional grey matter resources that can't be traced to owners anymore but might still be used somewhere.

There will be 50 dev EKS environments that nobody knows for sure who owns or whether they can be shut down. There will be non-compute resources with monthly charges like the 5000 kms keys at $1/key/month without any easy way to know if there's an object in S3 somewhere that used that key and is subject to a legal retention policy. They all add up.

Sure you can say "Well just be more disciplined" but discipline and large enterprises are orthogonal concepts, especially when the people who start cloud migrations are the type who don't think ahead and usually bounce to another job before the costs of their poor decisions come due.

None of this would really matter if it were just enterprise companies padding Amazon's bottom line but the expansion of data centers has real world costs in the destroyed ecosystems and usage of energy and water for all these unused and useless resources.