[foobiekr]

Cloud was actually the answer to "how do I give more virtualized compute to people without hiring more expert server and networking admins."

The rest is noise.

Startups aside, most enterprise teams match the following: apps don't need to scale massively (scale up is enough and a surprising number of large, well-knwon services are entirely based on scale-up architectures behind the facade), most don't need dynamic scale, and most aren't even going to be started and stopped dynamically.

But hiring people who can run a network, only to have them sit idle most of the time or - and this is common - doing things and as a result breaking things, and people who can run servers and VMware and so on, and firewall, and WAN connectivity, ...

A lot of these things are, in fact, trivial, but vendors made them stupid and hard and painful to set up and doubly painful to troubleshoot. Cloud exploited that situation.

Things aren't a _lot_ better now but they're somewhat better, and now the economics of cloud are starting to get looked at.

[g9yuayon]

> how do I give more virtualized compute to people without hiring more expert server and networking admins

I put these into the bucket of productivity and low cost. And this issue arises when we need to scale our business, in particular our computation.

[foobiekr]

It's not really true though. Incremental expansion doesn't actually require more heads if the compute is uniform.

I should really have mentioned storage. Networking is a vendor-imposed shitshow, but storage, storage is next level. It's almost like the vendors in 1995-2020 actively built their products around spite and hate for their customers.

To me it is interesting that despite the massive economic advantage that vendors _should_ have, they've made their products so unusable that people will pay 3x-10x more just to not have to deal with them, which is what cloud amounts to for enterprise customers.