No 1 got rid of any policy. Cloud meant any team could just take out their company card and sign up. Same as how SaaS got popular.
The problem is, what is critical? That server was non-production and there were 100s to 1000s of things more critical to deal with. It was low priority.
Maybe you know but to many up the chain in many orgs - they don't know. I've seen way worse scenarios - things on someone's laptop with ports opened that were production critical.
Cloud isn't the cure, you're right, but it forced a lot of change.
> Cloud isn't the cure, you're right, but it forced a lot of change.
That's the thing - there are plenty of organizations that operate solely in the cloud but do not give their teams the authority/ability to spend without prior approval. And there are plenty of organizations that have no cloud presence that allow their teams the discretion to spend money when spending money is the right answer.
For a lot of companies, the move to the cloud was a super large benefit. I'm just arguing that the real benefit to those organizations was a side effect and that many organizations probably still don't realize this.
My point was exactly that internal use cases still has a reliability/scalability factor.
> it is making more and more sense to self-host either on prem or in a data center
I'd say it's the other way around. Automation improvements, infrastructure as code and less knowledge has meant Cloud now makes sense. Back in the days it was a lot easier to find people skilled in self-hosting and the common language was something like Redhat and not AWS. Self-hosting didn't meant getting internal networking and stacks enough to run kubernetes. You'd have a single server or 2 and that was it. It's a totally different game.
> I have never seen a big three providers cloud costs per $ for a given machine ever reduce
It has in a lot of ways, e.g. similar prices for faster CPUs (newer generation) and e.g. with AWS getting 2 real cores vs 1 (core) + 1 (thread).
The problem is server hardware is cheaper. Electricity, rent (data center) and wages is not. This growing cost eats into self-hosting a lot more than the hardware savings. The prices not going up is actually already a cost saving. Most data centers want to up your contract by at least inflation % per year if not more.
Electricity of a Macbook M1 Pro running my build locally is cheaper than self-hosting or Amazon, as far as I can tell so while I get your reasoning - I'm talking about Dev compute.
Also MRKL and other tools (even yes for Infra as code) are making it to my mind more viable and easy than the old days. Good times are ahead.
Was that the benefit? I thought it's reliability, scalability, etc.
I remember having a FAST shared server for CI. "Someone" was in charge of it. Every time it went down everyone lost 1/2 a day trying to ask "someone" to reboot it.