I had a problem figuring out why the place I was working wanted to move from in-house to AWS; their workload was easily handled by a few servers, they had no big bursts of traffic, and they didn't need any of the specialized features of AWS.
Eventually, I realized that it was because the devs wanted to put "AWS" on their resumes. I wondered how long it would take management to catch on that they were being used as a place to spruce up your resume before moving on to catch bigger fish.
But not long after, I realized that the management was doing the same thing. "Led a team migration to AWS" looked good on their resume, also, and they also intended to move on/up. Shortly after I left, the place got bought and the building it was in is empty now.
I wonder, now that Amazon is having layoffs and Big Tech generally is not as many people's target employer, will "migrated off of AWS to in-house servers" be what devs (and management) want on their resume?
Devs wanting to put AWS on their resume push for it, then the next wave you hire only knows AWS.
And then discussions on how to move forward are held between people that only know AWS and people who want to use other stuff, but only one side is transparent about it.
with "dev wanting X" nothing happens. "leadership deciding X" then it needs to get done.
That was what I thought, but when the middle management also wants it, then it can become the 'obvious choice', a la 'nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM'. It seems that middle management + devs can make it seem inevitable to the people above them, especially if those people are non-tech.