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It's interesting to think about the process that lead to this: "its just money, devs time costs more.. do what you gotta do" Are cloud vendor salesmen doing je

It's interesting to think about the process that lead to this: "its just money, devs time costs more.. do what you gotta do" Are cloud vendor salesmen doing jedi mind tricks? Or are these decisions just made by incompetent people? Who researches this kind of stuff? It's some kind of a management trends history subject.

shiftpgdn 4y ago
Nobody got fired buying IBM^H^H^H Amazon.
- Gravityloss 4y ago
  If I was a CEO, and my CTO did such a poor job, firing would certainly be a consideration...
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  I think Elon Musk got technically demoted but at any rate shuffled around for wanting to use Microsoft for the servers, Paypal ended up using Unix instead.
bombcar 4y ago
Depends on where the budgets go - salary goes into something they have to answer for - "cloud infrastructure" goes elsewhere in the budget they don't have to answer for.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Right - CapEx vs OpEx Write big checks for big servers every few years Vs Recurring monthly out the door slowly growing, but maybe 2x higher in total Also flexibility in not having to do capacity (or much of any other) planning.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    There's also the thousand cuts - if you want a big server, you will have to do lots of discussion and arguing about the cost there of, but if instead you're adding a small monthly cost, the arguing isn't as much. You keep doing that and suddenly someone notices that half the budget is AWS, at which point the "move onsite" dance begins (until the next time the big server argument happens).
steveBK123 4y ago
There’s also a lot of politics around OpEx vs capitalEx. In prior firms we’d have to go hat-in-hand for $3M of hardware every 3 years on an upgrade cycle. Of course few were around long enough to be on the requesting or approving side of this upgrade cycle and it would drag out painfully. Sometimes we’d try to get creative and go more just-in-time and come back for $500K every 6 months but the pain would just be more frequent. On the other hand, $150k/mo slowly growing adds up to more in the longterm, but no senior manager ever has to approve a single $500K-$3M purchase request.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  Hardware need not be CapEx. There are plenty of leasing options available for just about everything. There are also some wild Section 179 options: https://www.section179.org/section_179_leases/ https://www.section179.org/section_179_leases/

shiftpgdn 4y ago

Nobody got fired buying IBM^H^H^H Amazon.

Gravityloss 4y ago
If I was a CEO, and my CTO did such a poor job, firing would certainly be a consideration...
daniel-cussen 4y ago
I think Elon Musk got technically demoted but at any rate shuffled around for wanting to use Microsoft for the servers, Paypal ended up using Unix instead.

bombcar 4y ago

Depends on where the budgets go - salary goes into something they have to answer for - "cloud infrastructure" goes elsewhere in the budget they don't have to answer for.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
steveBK123 4y ago
Right - CapEx vs OpEx Write big checks for big servers every few years Vs Recurring monthly out the door slowly growing, but maybe 2x higher in total Also flexibility in not having to do capacity (or much of any other) planning.
- bombcar 4y ago
  There's also the thousand cuts - if you want a big server, you will have to do lots of discussion and arguing about the cost there of, but if instead you're adding a small monthly cost, the arguing isn't as much. You keep doing that and suddenly someone notices that half the budget is AWS, at which point the "move onsite" dance begins (until the next time the big server argument happens).

steveBK123 4y ago

There’s also a lot of politics around OpEx vs capitalEx. In prior firms we’d have to go hat-in-hand for $3M of hardware every 3 years on an upgrade cycle. Of course few were around long enough to be on the requesting or approving side of this upgrade cycle and it would drag out painfully. Sometimes we’d try to get creative and go more just-in-time and come back for $500K every 6 months but the pain would just be more frequent. On the other hand, $150k/mo slowly growing adds up to more in the longterm, but no senior manager ever has to approve a single $500K-$3M purchase request.

kkielhofner 4y ago
Hardware need not be CapEx. There are plenty of leasing options available for just about everything. There are also some wild Section 179 options: https://www.section179.org/section_179_leases/ https://www.section179.org/section_179_leases/