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There's a very interesting insight from your message.

The Cloud providers made a lot of sense to finance departments since aside from the promised savings, you would take that cloud expense now and lower your tax rate.

After the passing of the One Beautiful Bill ("OBB"), the law allows you to accelerate CapEx to instead expense it[1], similar to the benefit given by cloud service providers.

This puts way more wind on the sails of the on-prem movement, for sure

[1] https://www.iqxbusiness.com/big-beautiful-bill-impact-on-cap...

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CFO here and I capex everything I can, never understood why you'd want to opex this. I'm trying to make EBITDA as enticing as possible for investors and anyone else that cares. Also want to show we have control over technology cost and it grows at a step function instead of a linear. Capex spending is usually large and planned, so we monitor it more closely and need to see a good reason to approve a large new purchase. Giving AWS a credit card is giving devs a blank check.
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Curious question. If opex is so exceedingly high for cloud, pushing people back to capex to save money, then why has no cloud entrant come around with a price competitive alternative?

It seems the main issue is that everyone is anchored to AWS so they have no incentive to reduce their prices. Probably same for Azure. I think Google is just risky because they kill products so easily.

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> you shouldn't own the infrastructure (capital expense) and instead just account for the cost as operational expense (opex)

That was part of the reason.

The real reason was the internal infrastructure team in many orgs got nowhere. There was a huge queue and many teams instead had to find infinite workarounds including standing up their own. The "cloud" provided a standardized way to at least deal with this mess e.g. single source of billing.

> A 1990s VP of IT would look at this post and say, what's new?

Speed. The US lives in luxury but outside of that it often takes a LONG time to get proper servers. You don't just go online. There are many places where you have to talk to a vendor with no list price and the drama continues. Being out of capacity can mean weeks to months before you get anywhere.

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Yep! The biggest win for me when AWS came out was that I could self-serve what I needed and put it on a credit card, rather than filing a ticket and waiting some number of days / weeks / months to get a new VM approved and deployed.
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I agree - my reference to the 1990s VP of IT was looking at the post, which is about on-premise data centers... not the cloud. I don't think there's a speed advantage for on-premise data centers now vs the 1990s, but if there is let me know. Otherwise, indeed, it's a 1990s-era blast from the past.
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Agreed. Also, a realistic assessment should not downplay the very real overhead and headache of managing your on-premise data center. It comes at a cost in engineering/firefighting hours, it's not painless. There's a reason this eternal ping pong keeps going on!
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Yeah, I think the major improvement of cloud services was the rationalization of them into services with a cost instead of "ask that person for a whatsit" and "hopefully the associate goomba will approve."

All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces

https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

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