A nimble enough company doesn't need it, but I've had 6 months of lead time to request one extra server in an in-house data center due to sheer organizational failure. The big selling point of the cloud really was that one didn't have to deal with the division lording over the data center, or have any and all access to even log in by their priesthood who knew less unix than the programmers.
I've been in multiple cloud migrations, and it was always solving political problems that were completely self inflicted. The decision was always reasonable if you looked just at the people the org having to decide between the internal process and the cloud bill. But I have little doubt that if there was any goal alignment between the people managing the servers and those using them, most of those migrations would not have happened.
I've been in projects where they're 'on the cloud' to be 'scalable', but I had to estimate my CPU needs up front for a year to get that in the budget, and there wasn't any defined process for "hey, we're growing more than we assumed - we need a second server - or more space - or faster CPUs - etc". Everything that 'cloud' is supposed to allow for - but ... that's not budgeted for - we'll need to have days of meetings to determine where the money for this 'upgrade' is coming from. But our meetings are interrupted by notices from teams that "things are really slow/broken"...
About sums up my last job. Desperation leads to micromanaging the wrong indicators. The results are rage-inducing. I am glad I got let go by the micromanagers because if not I would have quit come New Year.
Yeah, clouds are such a huge improvement over what was basically an industry standard practice to say oh you want a server fill out this 20 page form and will get you your server in 6 to 12 months.
But we don't need one minute response times from the cloud really. So something like hetzner that may just be all right. We'll get it to you within an hour. It's still light years ahead of what we used to be.
And if it makes the entire management and cost side and performance with bare metal or closer to bare metal on the provider side, then that is all good.
And this doesn't even address the fact that yeah, AWA has a lot of hidden costs, but a lot of those managed data center outsourcing contracts where you were subjected to those lead times for new servers... really weren't much cheaper than AWS back in the day.
Yes, sorry, I didn't mean to impugn Hetzner by saying they were an hour delay, just that there could be providers that are cheaper that didn't need to offer AWS-level scaling.
Like a company should be able to offer 1 day service, or heck 1 week with their internal datacenters. Just have a scheduled buffer of machines to power up and adapt the next week/month supply order based on requests.
The management overhead in requesting new cloud resources is now here. Multiple rounds of discussion and TPS reports to spin up new services that could be a one click deploy.
Worst is when one of those dysfunctional orgs that does the IT systems administration tries to create their own internal cloud offerings instead of using a cloud provider. It's often worse than hosted clouds or bare metal.
But I definitely agree, it's usually a self-inflicted problem and the big gamble attempting to work around infrastructure teams. I've had similar issues with security teams when their out of the box testing scripts show a fail, and they just don't comprehend that their test itself is invalid for the architecture of your system.
Running away from internal IT works until they inevitably catch up to the escapees. At $dayjob the time required to spin up a single cloud VM is now measured in years. I’ve seen projects take so long that the cloud vendor started sending deprecation notices half way through for their tech stacks but they forged ahead anyway because it’s “too hard to steer that ship”.
The current “runners” are heading towards SaaS platforms like Salesforce, which is like the cloud but with ten times worse lock in.
Then you end up with too-large servers all over the place with no rhyme or reason, burning through your opex budget.
Also, what network does the VM land in? With what firewall rules? What software will it be running? Exposed to the Internet? Updated regularly? Backed up? Scanned for malware or vulnerabilities? Etc…
Do you expect every Tom,
Dick, and Harry to know the answers to these questions when they “just” want a server?
This is why IT teams invariably have to insert themselves into these processes, because the alternative is an expensive chaos that gets the org hacked by nation states.
The problem is that when interests aren’t forced to align — a failure of senior management — then the IT teams become an untenable overhead instead of a necessary and tolerable one.
The cloud is a technology often misapplied to solve a “people problem”, which is why it won’t ever work when misused in this way.
Not GP, but at my previous job we had something very similar. The form did offer options for a handful of variables (on-prem VMware vs EC2, vCPU, RAM, disk, OS/template, administrators, etc), but once submitted, the ticket went to the cloud/architecture team for review, who could adjust the inputted selections as well as configure things like networks, firewall rules, security groups, etc. Once approved, the automated workflow provisioned the server(s), firewall rules, security groups, etc and sent the details to the requestor.
I've been in multiple cloud migrations, and it was always solving political problems that were completely self inflicted. The decision was always reasonable if you looked just at the people the org having to decide between the internal process and the cloud bill. But I have little doubt that if there was any goal alignment between the people managing the servers and those using them, most of those migrations would not have happened.