[photonthug]

> I had enough say within the organizations I worked at, who are now clients

This sounds like experience that’s mainly at small/medium sized orgs. At large orgs the devops/cloud people are constantly under pressure to install random stuff from random vendors. That pressure comes from every direction because every department head (infosec/engineering/data science) is trying to spend huge budgets to justify their own salary/headcount and maintain job security, because it’s harder to fire someone if you’re in the middle of a migrate-to-vendor process they championed, and you’re locked into the vendor contract, etc etc. People also will seek to undermine every reasonable standard about isolation and break down the walls you design between environments so that even QA or QC type vendors want their claws in prod. Best practice or not, You can’t really say no to all of it all the time or it’s perceived as obstructionist.

Thus there’s constant churn of junk you don’t want and don’t need that’s “supposed to be available” everywhere and the list is always changing. Of course in the limit there is crusty unused junk and we barely know what’s running anywhere in clouds or clusters. Regardless of the state of the art with Devops, most orgs are going to have clutter because those orgs are operating in a changing world and without a decisive or even consistent vision of what they want/need.

[devops99]

> At large orgs the devops/cloud people are constantly

Two of our clients are large (15,000+ employees, and 22,000+ employees) orgs. Their tech execs are happy with our work, specifically our software delivery pipeline with guard rails and where we emphasize a "Heroku-like experience".

One of their projects needed HiTRUST, and we made it happen for them in under four weeks (no we're not geniuses, we stole the smarts of the AWS DoD-compliant architecture & deployment patterns) and the tone of the execs seemed to change pretty significantly after that.

One of these clients laid off more than half their IT staff suddenly this year.

When I was in individual contributor role in a mid-size (just under 3,000 employees), I wrote my thoughts, "internal whitepaper" or whatever being fully candid about the absurd struggles we were having (why does instantiating a VM take over three weeks?), and sent it to the CTO (and also the CEO, but the CTO didn't know about that) and some things changed pretty quickly.

But yeah, things suck in large orgs, that's why large orgs are outsourcing which is in the most-downstream customers' (the American peoples') best interests too -- a win-win-win all around.