[cookiecaper]

This is one of the many reasons AWS and cloud computing in general are way overrated.

I know of a company that pays an AWS bill sufficient to buy the equivalent of their pre-cloud datacenter's hardware every 1.5 months. The extra staff required to perform hardware maintenance would also cost about 2 months' worth of AWS each year (that means they're paying ~3x more than they would with hardware). Yet they moved to the cloud because it's the hip thing to do.

Cloud has upsides and things that are useful, especially for smaller proprietors who can take advantage of cheap droplets from DigitalOcean et al, but for grown-up companies, moving off your hardware shouldn't be automatic.

[brazzledazzle]

I think in some cases it might simply be the means to dump 1) people/groups that just don't have a large scale mindset and 2) bypass business processes that are absolutely not designed for large scale systems.

In that scenario you have a bunch of entrenched groups fighting about capex, capacity planning and budget all to get barely enough hardware to account for what you're doing in the next 3-12 months. Instead of taking a step back and creating a long term simple process for regular growth and replacement they get caught in the weeds because they have very old school mindsets.

Then you have your old school finance groups who are using terrifyingly delicate and complex interconnected spreadsheets to manage hardware expenditures and depreciation while maintaining old school draconian policies concerning CapEx budgets but allowing you to basically go nuts with OpEx.

You could try to change the culture in these entrenched groups who will view your attempts to make things better as political moves against them or you could just say "we're moving everything into the cloud" and make a complete end run around all of the people and baggage. The former is probably the "right" thing to do but the latter is going to let you focus on your product letting you get you back to being competitive.