I sold all my AMZN stock by 2006 when I quit thinking that everyone would figure out the secret to doing your own hardware cheap. I then went to try to convert

I sold all my AMZN stock by 2006 when I quit thinking that everyone would figure out the secret to doing your own hardware cheap. I then went to try to convert other businesses over to doing it cheaply, but as an engineer I just wound up getting into fights with my managers who loved spending money. It is all about Empire building and managers wanted those expensive VMWare and EMC vendor relationships to manage in order to fluff up their resumes. They want more people under their umbrella. If you start hiring Directors of Network Engineering you'll find that you start hiring lots of expensive CCIEs and spending a lot of money on Cisco. It is almost a problem of being too small, since you can't quite easily point out how having single SATA drives in all the servers will save millions over having hardware RAID cards, and having simple networking in your rack design will also save millions over what Cisco would like to push on you. So you overspend by $250k here and there and everywhere, and pretty quickly you're back up to cloud costs. At a smaller level it isn't quite as obvious how obscenely expensive to your capex these kinds of managers are, and they know hot to talk in ways that make Managment believe that they're buying all kinds of Enterprise-class resiliancy and leveragable vendor relationships and all that kind of nonsense. Hiring smart engineers instead is something that most Managers don't know how to do either, which is what you need in order to get a decent level of automation in place in order to scale the ability to manage it all. And don't get me started on high priced consultants that can be brought in to overdesign the most complicated solutions possible by never saying 'no' to any kind of requirement that IT management can dream up. I've seen VLAN diagrams that you wouldn't believe... But anyway, if you can solve that human problem, through hiring the right people and having a corporate culture of "Frugality" (as much as I hate it, that focus Amazon has is what let them do IT cheaply and then resell it). But it isn't a technical problem, or a financial problem, or even really a staffing problem, it is fundamentally a culture problem. And then the trick in my mind would be to do Frugality right without being as much of a dick about it as Amazon is.