And the ones we got on Friday were wrong (we asked for 3 * 16GB ones + 1 * 2GB, we got a 16GB project container with 4GB pod limits).

For our hadoop request - yes it got provisioned in >8hrs (mostly I think because no one is using it) but none of the access instructions work and everyone who has used it is mysteriously unavailable - so we can't access it.

Compare and contrast to self service from any cloud.

Why : well it's demand management. If you do self service and say "pay for what you want" then IT's costs bloom and the CIO is shot. If you do that in a cloud scenario then Cloud costs bloom and the CIO says "you guys have spent your money badly". This means that you need police and you need people who you ask to give you what you need if they are happy. These people obstruct you and then get things wrong.

First, there are internal processes. All too often they end up needlessly slowing velocity. This isn't a technology problem but a people problem. Using a public cloud enables people to circumvent these issues, in some cases.

Second, there are costs. What does it cost to give someone the features they ask for in the time they want it? This is a requirements, design, time, and cost problem.

Basically small markets (internal IT) can't sustain the investment to support the requirements design time cost issue - while the public cloud folk can say "any colour you like so long as it's black" and there are enough takers to pay for it all.

People are investing in cloud because its faster, more agile and better, not because it's cheaper.

The top line looks expensive, but if you then do the correct analysis on the cost side of the equation (taking out staff costs and DC costs) then I think it is either close or in the black from a cost perspective.

If the business case was really bad, I don't think we would see the rapid uptake we have seen.

Then you have competition (GCP, Azure, Alibaba) which will tend to lower the price, but for now the cloud industry grows. Their goal is to attract new customers who didn't use the cloud before.

Do you really? In my experience, admittedly outside of SV, pretty much nobody needs that.

That only makes sense to me in the context of a business being an IT shop to begin with. Most businesses aren't, and their new product offerings require factories and dies and labor and materials. Besides which, the problem of provisioning is entirely overblown for this scale of business. I can spin up new servers all day on our on-prem vSphere cluster.

Lots of businesses outside of 'IT shops' use computers. I currently work in Civil Engineering and more and more of our product and service offerings have an IT/Online/Web based component which involves setting up some sort server.

I can spin up new servers all day on our on-prem vSphere cluster.

I what price? At my old job an on-perm vSphere 'machine' cost my department a lot more than what AWS was charging.

And since it's my 'private' cluster I don't have to worry about queuing my jobs and waiting for the machines to be free. There is no way my department would have bought me those machines as physical hardware.

At that scale in a single company the ability to provision verticals weighs heavily in architecture and design choices.

"Should we spin this new feature out as a microservice or fold it into an existing app so we don't have to wait weeks and do crazy cost accounting for new environments?" And the answer has follow-on effects because now it has to be accounted for in a specific teams' backlog and we encounter yet more waiting.