Comment by re-thc
9 hours ago
> you shouldn't own the infrastructure (capital expense) and instead just account for the cost as operational expense (opex)
That was part of the reason.
The real reason was the internal infrastructure team in many orgs got nowhere. There was a huge queue and many teams instead had to find infinite workarounds including standing up their own. The "cloud" provided a standardized way to at least deal with this mess e.g. single source of billing.
> A 1990s VP of IT would look at this post and say, what's new?
Speed. The US lives in luxury but outside of that it often takes a LONG time to get proper servers. You don't just go online. There are many places where you have to talk to a vendor with no list price and the drama continues. Being out of capacity can mean weeks to months before you get anywhere.
Yep! The biggest win for me when AWS came out was that I could self-serve what I needed and put it on a credit card, rather than filing a ticket and waiting some number of days / weeks / months to get a new VM approved and deployed.
I agree - my reference to the 1990s VP of IT was looking at the post, which is about on-premise data centers... not the cloud. I don't think there's a speed advantage for on-premise data centers now vs the 1990s, but if there is let me know. Otherwise, indeed, it's a 1990s-era blast from the past.