It’s a marketing trap. But also a job guarantee since everyone’s in the same trap. You got a couple cloud engineers or "DevOps" that lobby for AWS or any other hyperscaler, NaiveDate managers that write down some decision report littered with logical fallacies, and a few years in the sink cost is so high you can’t get off of it, and instead of doing productivity work you’re sitting in myriads of FinOps meetings, where even fewer understand what’s going on.
Engineering mangers are promised cost savings on the HR level. Corporate finance managers are promised OpEx for CapEx trade-off, the books look better immediately. Cloud engineers are embarking on their AWS journey of certification being promised an uptick to their salaries. It’s a win/win for everyone, in isolation, a local optimum for everyone, but the organization now has to pay way more than it—hypothetically—would have been paying for bare metal ops. And hypothetical arguments are futile.
And it lends itself well to overengineering and the microservices cargo cult. Your company ends up with a system distributed around the globe across multiple AZs per region of business operations, striving to shave off those 100ms latency off your clients’ RTT. But it’s outgrown your comprehension, and it’s slow anyway, and you can’t scale up because it’s expensive. And instead of having one problem, you now have 99 and your bill is one.
All great points. I have seen in company of smart people CIO/CTO would freely up admit "Look we know cloud may not be cheap or easier to manage but this is the direction we have taken since we are getting out of owning or managing hardware/datacenter"
So it is not like one can dazzle decision makers with any logic or hard data. They are just announcing the decision while calling it a robust discussion over pros and cons of on-prem vs cloud placement.
Yep. I’ve also seen managerial people worship AWS sales reps as oracles, misconstruing ordinary sales meetings with them as something divine, in which they would disclose a lot of company’s IP in awe for them, just to listen to some blabbing superficial truisms. I mean, ChatGPT could tell you more. To add insult to that, the managerial people wouldn’t listen to their own senior, staff, principal engineers, and prefer to follow what the AWS reps told them.
It’s really disturbing how the human factor controls decision making in corporations.
For my peace of mind, I chose a sane path - if the company as an entity decides to do AWS, I will do my best to meet its goals. I’ve got all Professional and Specialty certs. It’s the human nature. No purpose in tilting at windmills.
> For my peace of mind, I chose a sane path - if the company as an entity decides to do AWS, I will do my best to meet its goals...
Amen to that.
Any kind of performance improvement, monitoring work I did for my applications has met with indifference or derision from managers. Because only if I had put efforts in cloud migration we could be "Horizontal Pod Scaling" for performance and fully managed Datadog console for monitoring the services.