Anybody with experience on the ops side of that is absolutely in favor of simple and easy to understand -- and that often gets you cheap as a side effect.

Source: almost thirty years of ops.

Having talked to AWS evangelists, it seems that they truly believe it cuts costs. In their reality this is true, because an alternative with the same guarantees and risk costs more. The implicit disagreement is that you often don’t need all those guarantees.

> because an alternative with the same guarantees and risk costs more

I really doubt this. The one theme you see on almost every AWS proponent is some high amount of delusion about what guarantees AWS actually provides you.

Hmm. I guess there's guarantees that it won't happen, and guarantees that if it happens then it wasn't supposed to and can't be your fault, and the latter may still be pretty attractive to some decision-makers.

> if it happens then it wasn't supposed to and can't be your fault

Yeah, sure. Nobody gets fired for buying from IBM.

Well, if large companies had any competence in decision-making, they would be unbeatable and it would be hopeless to work on anything else at all. So, yeah, that's a public good.

In my experience those devops people where hired and empowered by senior managers to make things expensive and complicate because the company is 'enterprise' and has to follow "industry best practices"

Nice generalization.

So far I haven’t noticed that if I spend more for the company that I also get paid more.

Remember how Twitter lost 80% of its staff and still kept running?

And Twitter ceo turned his account private because they can’t figure out what the algorithm does

For now... There's a lot of inertia obviously.