The bureaucracy will always find a way.
But we don't need one minute response times from the cloud really. So something like hetzner that may just be all right. We'll get it to you within an hour. It's still light years ahead of what we used to be.
And if it makes the entire management and cost side and performance with bare metal or closer to bare metal on the provider side, then that is all good.
And this doesn't even address the fact that yeah, AWA has a lot of hidden costs, but a lot of those managed data center outsourcing contracts where you were subjected to those lead times for new servers... really weren't much cheaper than AWS back in the day.
Like a company should be able to offer 1 day service, or heck 1 week with their internal datacenters. Just have a scheduled buffer of machines to power up and adapt the next week/month supply order based on requests.
But I definitely agree, it's usually a self-inflicted problem and the big gamble attempting to work around infrastructure teams. I've had similar issues with security teams when their out of the box testing scripts show a fail, and they just don't comprehend that their test itself is invalid for the architecture of your system.
The current “runners” are heading towards SaaS platforms like Salesforce, which is like the cloud but with ten times worse lock in.
We have a Service Now ticket that you can complete that spins the server up at completion. Kind of an easy way to do it.
Also, what network does the VM land in? With what firewall rules? What software will it be running? Exposed to the Internet? Updated regularly? Backed up? Scanned for malware or vulnerabilities? Etc…
Do you expect every Tom, Dick, and Harry to know the answers to these questions when they “just” want a server?
This is why IT teams invariably have to insert themselves into these processes, because the alternative is an expensive chaos that gets the org hacked by nation states.
The problem is that when interests aren’t forced to align — a failure of senior management — then the IT teams become an untenable overhead instead of a necessary and tolerable one.
The cloud is a technology often misapplied to solve a “people problem”, which is why it won’t ever work when misused in this way.
The first time you do it, you can do a consult with a cloud team member
And of course they get audited every quarter so usage is tracked
I've been in multiple cloud migrations, and it was always solving political problems that were completely self inflicted. The decision was always reasonable if you looked just at the people the org having to decide between the internal process and the cloud bill. But I have little doubt that if there was any goal alignment between the people managing the servers and those using them, most of those migrations would not have happened.