Further, it needs people in decision making roles who understand and value the strategic differences between having an infrastructure concept that is trapped in one provider's proprietary software tooling ecosystem (aws, azure, etc), vs things built on open standards that are portable.
And the reality is eventually you'll get a clueless one, and everything will revert to the mean.
And the mean is heavily influenced by marketing propaganda.
Most CTOs (and increasingly M2s and M3s) I've met are what I call "box architects". You know the ones who love drawing boxes, moving one box inside another box, drawing a line between 2 boxes or changing a unidirectional arrow into a bidirectional one, then declaring the hard part is done and now we need any random engineer to implement that or "Is there an AWS service that does that? I just don't see the value in us doing it in house".
A "super optimized tools" is just a box that you swap for another box and the "minor changes" will be just a couple of arrows than need to change or another box to swap for another box. You get them to feel good about doing architect stuff plus the 10x reduction in the bill. They can always replace that box with another box later after all.
If a car salesman told me I could save 50% of my fuel bill from driving their special car a certain way I'd laugh at them.
2016 - lets use EC2, its just VM, we can move off
2018 - I see you are hosting your own PostgreSQL in EC2, you can use our managed solution
2020 - you are already using 18 our services (note, at this point you might still be using non-vendor products, like VMs, managed DB, and so on), why not use our IAM instead of rolling out your own auth.
2024 - you are now deeply locked, lets add more lock-in, why don't you use this tool to optimize your costs (welcome DynamoDB)
At this point, no one would ever question next tool from salesman. Because engineers see that company doesnt have strategy to move to another cloud, why should they reject this new tool?
also consider the people who are involved, a lot of times after 2 years you have totally new people in your team, they won't have context and constraints you had in the past when deciding to buy "just VM", they see it as "we already use AWS"
I would do a calculation based on their public price plan and come up with a 5-10x price compared to the bare metal OVH solution that perfectly fit our use case. I would then ask the sales team where I made a mistake in my calculation and hear nothing back.
A few months later, they would come back with the same pitch and the whole process would repeat...
I have a very hard time believing this, especially with fuel economy and emission regulations
It is true that fuel economy regulations make it much less practical to deliver gas guzzlers out of pure laziness. (As you may know, the Corolla GR is by far the most expensive of these options, because it's designed to achieve horsepower over mileage.)
People who know the tech, no
Non-technical middle management types, yes. It produces revenue when done aggressively enough, google "solarwinds sales people" for many anecdotal examples of extreme persistence. Not that I agree with it.
We can go with your idea, sure: a few months in, an Account Manager from the cloud provider shows up and says your bill could be reduced by 50% if you just adopt some changes, using their custom, super optimized tools (“minor changes” will be the mantra).
And now you have your own company looking back to you on how can they get those savings, people who don’t understand what a VM is and cannot differentiate salesforce from an elastic container, as everything is “cloud”, but heard “50% off”.