> Sure. You just need more people to keep an eye on what your consumption rates are. Or to handle access control systems or manage service accounts and client certificates, ensure firewalls, additional tooling around firewalls to ensure things aren’t getting exposed outside. Countless cost projections on top of a complicated billing system.

At a certain scale, you need all these things with internal clouds too. Resource provisioning, basic security, and managing "insider risk" don't just go away when you own the infrastructure.

Not nearly in the same way.

This is like saying that "You also need to have a cashier!" when you're comparing a shopping mall to a corner store.

How so? Presumably someone with an internal 'cloud' needs someone to be responsible for a large kube cluster, to handle a uniform way to do scheduling/resource management, etc. Having an engineer who knows how to do this in AWS doesn't seem more expensive than an engineer who can roll their own internal 'cloud' system...

Just curious, do you put 'cloud' in quotes to indicate that you're using a different definition of the word?

> Countless cost projections on top of a complicated billing system

I think it's a loooot easier to design and build a cost-efficient multi-tiered high availability application than it is to make reasonable cost projections in whatever micro-currency every seconary and tertiary service uses.

And I'm ever surprised by how time-intensive it is.