It’s easy to understand when you have lots of money, but no time. Cloud is simple and expensive, self managed is complex and cheap. Time’s money and all that!
I don’t need to manage the cloud offering and that management time is expensive. Your befuddlement at this simple economic calculation is, well, befuddling.
It's shocking that some people cannot fathom that in certain scenarios cloud offerings make sense.
They don't always make sense, in certain scenarios it is worth taking an open source, cloud independent tool, in some scenarios you can roll your own, but there are circumstances where it's a good choice using a tool your cloud provider gives you.
You're going to pay the bill regardless, whether the employee is hired by your team or hired by the cloud vendor.
I don't know how management works through this math, maybe managing people gets exhausting and they just want to out-source it so leadership doesn't have to deal with it and then they can just focus on the core product.
And the above "I don't want to deal with it" reason isn't spoken of, the more more commonly touted benefit is cloud's "flexibility". Sure, but this is actually _really_ expensive. Every cloud migration effort I've experienced is only just worthwhile to begin to talk about because the costs are based on long-term contracts of cloud resources, not the per-hour fees. Nice flexibility.
With that said, the cloud may be a good place for prototyping where the infrastructure isn't the core value add and it's uncertain. A start-up is a prototype and so here we are. But, for an established company to migrate to the cloud and fire the staff that's maintaining the on premise resources.. I'm skeptical. More than likely, this leads to maintaining both cloud and on premise resources, not firing anyone, and thus, actually increasing costs for an uncomfortably long time.
And for the folks on the ground, who don't pay the bills, the increase of accidental complexity is rather painful.
I'm very much paying my own cloud bills but there is no chance I would be able to orchestrate some of the workflows I want to orchestrate if it were not for Step Functions.
For a one person shop like me, AWS is a force multiplier. With it, I can do (say) 30% of what a dedicated engineer in a specific role could do. Without it, I'd be doing 0%.
I really like this tradeoff for my particular situation.
It's easy to get started and you don't need to worry about infra.
I've been a one-man army at places because leveraging these cloud offerings allows me to crank out working software that scales to the moon without much thought.
I'd rather pay AWS/GCP to handle infra, so that I can get 2-3x as many project done.
