[deadfece]

I've worked places where they had so many databases from M&A that half of their FTEs were wholly preoccupied all year with performing outstanding DB maintenance: fixing backups, doing storage management, patches, applying move/add/changes.

For them, managed DBMS was a life-changing event. As soon as they had RDS or even Azure SQL MI, they were begging the cloud team for more, so they could get their team back.

In some businesses, it's definitely not a big loss to lose agility by having a large portion of your team tangled up in infrastructure management, but for some businesses, that constraint is an impediment to their line of business. Some businesses are missing opportunities for want of infrastructure being able to move fast enough.

[sgarland]

Much of that can be automated (how do you think AWS does it?), but I get the point. Still, the OP said: "You save money by re-architecting and using more managed services." To me, that isn't implying "save money from personnel costs," it's discussing pure service cost.

[deadfece]

That maintenance problem is sometimes also expensive in terms of service costs. Which is more of a tech debt problem than a cloud comparison, honestly, but they're often inseparable.

Extended support costs on old hardware and software are sometimes astronomical. Then you're paying all of that to get something that, compared to modern gear, performs like ass and just breaks all the time.

I've also had C-suites tell me I have two months to start a project and have all the gear live, but I find we are only allowed to order direct from the manufacturer, and our orders will take 90 days to get to our door. Oh boy. That scenario is difficult to put into terms of money. Sometimes having that one-hop instant supply chain into a cloud service is a huge business enabler, sometimes it's not.

[sgarland]

I regret to inform you that you can also incur extended support costs with managed services.

[deadfece]

Ah, I thought we were having a discussion in good faith. Later!