[SpicyLemonZest]

The people who need to allocate software resources aren't "the government" writ broadly, they're specific people who operate specific organizations within it. You run a team within your local ministry of housing, and you identify a new analysis you want to run monthly that will take a day on a 12-core Spark cluster. Do you:

* clear out a supply closet, buy 12 new machines to put in it, and idle them for 97% of the year

* ask 12 employees to please deliver their computers to the supply closet on the last Friday of each month

* email Emmanuel Macron asking him to find another team who already cleared out their supply closet with spare cycles

Or do you just use the cloud and not have to solve an operational challenge every time you have a new idea? (The actual pre-cloud status quo was that most people simply couldn't implement any idea that would require more than 1 personal computer.)

[joe_mamba]

>The actual pre-cloud status quo was that most people simply couldn't implement any idea that would require more than 1 personal computer.

How did Spotify manage at the beginning without the cloud? How did any other company?

[SpicyLemonZest]

They built their own internal clouds, to varying degrees of jankiness depending on how important large scale compute was to their business. It was very important for Spotify, so they had a bunch of people working on it, to the degree that it was hurting focus on their core business goals.

In less tech-forward organizations, you usually just had "the server", and it was rude or even forbidden to just run programs on it on your own initiative. You had to coordinate which programs you wanted to run when. And you'd better make sure your program doesn't have a memory leak or something, because then nobody will be able to check their emails until the sysadmin fixes it.