But as an example: It took about 3 months to provision an AWS server in a recent company I consulted for due to their own bureaucracy and ineptitude of the Ops team.
On the other hand, when I needed a few CI servers for a startup I worked at, I just collected them from AppleStore during lunch hour.
Now this above is what people are "forgetting" and don't want to listen to.
But because AWS isn't in the office, it's fine. We could probably use Hetzner or OVH, but then we have to go through procurement which is as much of as hassle as going through IT.
I think it's the common reason why companies end up outsourcing technical work, whether it's to cloud or consulting companies or whatever. Leadership hasn't built a strong engineering culture (which includes hiring bar, how you promo people, etc.). This means companies are forced to spend 100x by outsourcing everything to get anything working, and AWS is one convenient way for that.
We planned a migration to move from 4OD instances to one on prem machine and we guessed we’d save $1000/mo, our builds would be faster and we’d have less failures due to capacity issues. We even had a spare workstation and a rack in the office that so the capex was 0.
I plugged the machine into the rack and no internet connectivity. Put in an IT ticket which took 2 days for a reply, only to be told that this was an unauthorised machine and needed to be imaged by IT. The back and forth took 4 weeks, multiple meetings and multiple approvals. My guess is that 4 people spent probably 10 hours arguing whether we should do this or not.
On AWS I can write a python script and have a running windows instance in 15 minutes.