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Many a big company migrated because they have those very same slow procurement problems with internal data centers. I saw multiple cloud migrations because internal friction was at a level that the price didn't matter: 6 months for the smallest VM kind of thing. Very adversarial relationships, often with very poor incentives, as the service setup costs for other business units were way inflated, but then the maintenance costs didn't pay enough. Paying 3x-4x more a year for just a semblance of reliability was seen as a big plus.
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At my current team at a “bigcorp” I have noticed a similar pattern. We use aws not because it’s efficient in any way.

We use it because we don’t want to deal with slow procurement process. It kills all the momentum.

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Exactly. I want to set up elastic search - I can either have procurement go through their sales, or be up and running via the marketplace in less time than it would take me to fill in the RFQ form to send to procurement.
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Have seen this repeatedly also.

Watched one company end up with a $250k AWS bill when their credits expired (which they could not pay).

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If you let it go that far then you were going to blow it one way or another - it’s not an excuse to totally ignore the cloud spend but it’s a n excuse to defer it to a later date. If your successful, fix it, if your not then AWS aren’t getting paid anyway!
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Yeah, they had an impossible to use number of credits (YC) until they expired, so every problem became a AWS solution.

As an example, they needed a lot of proxy servers. Instead of just using a proxy service, there was a fleet of ec2 instances.

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If all you have is AWS credits suddenly every problem looks like EC2.
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