[Jochim]

I'm a cloud proponent because it means not having to sit through hours of meetings to deploy a $5/mo virtual machine.

It also means some poor fuck at AWS gets woken up in the middle of the night instead of me when things go to shit.

It absolutely comes at a cost, and might not be the right fit for an organisation that's absolutely on top of it's hardware requirements and can afford to divert resources from new development work. For the rest of us it saves a lot of dev hours that would have otherwise been spent in pointless meetings or debating the best implementation of whatever half-baked stack has oozed it's way out of the organisation in an attempt to replicate what's handed to you with a cloud solution.

[awaythrow98765]

> I'm a cloud proponent because it means not having to sit through hours of meetings to deploy a $5/mo virtual machine.

And endless orgies of "call for pricing" with hardware vendors and hosting. Shitty websites where you can buy preconfigured servers somewhat cheaply, or vendor websites where you can configure everything but overpay. Useless sales-droids trying to "value-add" stuff on top.

Cloud buys are a lot friendlier, because you only have the one cloud vendor to worry about. Entry level you just pay list price by clicking a button. If you buy a lot, you are big enough to have your own business people to hammer out a rebate on list price, still very easy, still very simple. But overall still more expensive unfortunately.

[jjav]

> I'm a cloud proponent because it means not having to sit through hours of meetings to deploy a $5/mo virtual machine.

I'd hope there aren't actually hours of meetings for a single $5/mo VM?

But I would hope there are reviews and meetings when deploying enough of these to amount to real money. Companies that don't do that soon enough find themselves with a million dollar AWS bill without understanding what's going on.

Spend is spend, it's vital to understand what is being spent on what and why.

[Jochim]

> I'd hope there aren't actually hours of meetings for a single $5/mo VM?

Slightly exaggerated in the case of the $5 machine, probably 2-3 manhours total but it took 4 days for it to be deployed instead of ~5 minutes. We did spent tens of hours justifying why the business should spend ~$100 more per month on a production system where the metrics clearly indicated that it was resource constrained.

The same IT department that demanded we justify every penny spent did not apply any of that rigour to their own spending. Control over the deployment of resources was used as a political tool to increase their headcount.

> I would hope there are reviews and meetings when deploying enough of these to amount to real money. Companies that don't do that soon enough find themselves with a million dollar AWS bill without understanding what's going on.

I consider the judicious use of resources to be part of my job as a software engineer. A development team that isn't considering how they can reduce spend, tidy up, or right-size their resources is a massive red flag to me. Organisations frequently shoot themselves in the foot by shifting that responsibility away from the development team. The result is usually factional infighting and more meetings.