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There are all kinds of good and valid business reasons why, and all kinds of good and perhaps valid counterarguments to those reasons. None of which are the re

There are all kinds of good and valid business reasons why, and all kinds of good and perhaps valid counterarguments to those reasons. None of which are the real answer. The real answer is that the CEO/CTO/CxO doesn't want to have to think about these things, or getting expertise in-house for these things. They want it to be like electricity or water; something they have to pay for, but don't have to think about. Whether or not that's what really happens is irrelevant; it's what they think will happen, and to be honest it is what often happens. Even if they're paying more $$, they paying less in mental bandwidth, and never have to worry about whether they have (retained or retrained) sufficient in-house talent to maintain it. That's the real reason.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
This is effectively false because you just shift the burden of understanding infrastructure intricacies from a nominal infra team to a bunch of fractured developer teams, and they often have fight through idiot org-wide cloud policies to get anything done. Whatever you think you save by not having to hire or retrain AWS expertise on a nominal infra team, you lose far more by now needing to hire web developers, database engineers, machine learning engineers, mobile developers, etc., that are not just very good in their particular application domain, but also competent to operate self-service AWS tooling in an optimal way, despite having to contort around and fight with org-wide cloud policies that inhibit them for no actual cost, security, uniformity, or other benefit. What I mean specifically is that there is not even a reason to think that shifting to managed services with a cloud provider will allow you to cut costs in IT workforce or “not think about it” like you say. It’s just marketing snake oil that CTOs continue to believe this sort of thing at all.
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  It is entirely possible that you are just shifting the problem around to a place where it is less visible. Answer to the original question would still be the same. But, fwiw, I think you may sometimes be correct, especially since Amazon's flotilla of services is ever-expanding, resulting in having to know just as much as before, just for a proprietary domain. One is reminded of how corporations get talked into putting their businesses into SAP-world, and then discover that they need to hire SAP specialists to run it.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

This is effectively false because you just shift the burden of understanding infrastructure intricacies from a nominal infra team to a bunch of fractured developer teams, and they often have fight through idiot org-wide cloud policies to get anything done. Whatever you think you save by not having to hire or retrain AWS expertise on a nominal infra team, you lose far more by now needing to hire web developers, database engineers, machine learning engineers, mobile developers, etc., that are not just very good in their particular application domain, but also competent to operate self-service AWS tooling in an optimal way, despite having to contort around and fight with org-wide cloud policies that inhibit them for no actual cost, security, uniformity, or other benefit. What I mean specifically is that there is not even a reason to think that shifting to managed services with a cloud provider will allow you to cut costs in IT workforce or “not think about it” like you say. It’s just marketing snake oil that CTOs continue to believe this sort of thing at all.

rossdavidh 8y ago
It is entirely possible that you are just shifting the problem around to a place where it is less visible. Answer to the original question would still be the same. But, fwiw, I think you may sometimes be correct, especially since Amazon's flotilla of services is ever-expanding, resulting in having to know just as much as before, just for a proprietary domain. One is reminded of how corporations get talked into putting their businesses into SAP-world, and then discover that they need to hire SAP specialists to run it.