The agencies are similarly uncoordinated and will pick up their metaphorical credit card and just throw it at random small dev teams, internally, external, or a mix.

Those people will happily take the credit! The money just… disappears. It’s like a magic trick, or one of those street urchins that rips you off when you’re on holiday in some backwards part of the world like Paris.

I get brought in as “the cloud consultant” for a week or two at the end to deploy the latest ball of mud with live wires sticking out of it to production.

This invariably becomes an argument because the ball of mud the street urchins have sold to the customer is not fit for… anything… certainly not for handling PII or money, but they spent the budget and the status reports were all green ticks for years.

Fundamentally, the issue is that they're "going into the cloud" with platform as a service, IaC, and everything, but at some level they don't fully grok what that means and the type of oversight required to make that work at a reasonable cost.

"But the nice sales person from Microsoft assured me the cloud is cheaper!"