Lots of great insights here, which fully accord with my experience, even in the small end of town.
About a year ago, I was in a meeting with my new CEO (who had acquired my company). My side of the business had kept hardware in-house, his was in AWS. We had broadly similar businesses in the same industry and with the same kind of customers.
My side of the business needed to upgrade our 5+ year old hardware. The quote came to $100K; the CEO freaked out. I asked him how much he spent on AWS?
The answer was that they spent $30K per month on AWS.
The kicker is that we managed 10x as many customers as they did, our devops team was half the size, and we were rolling out continuous deployment while they were still struggling to automated upgrades. Our deployment environment is also far less complicated than theirs because there isn't a complex infrastructure stack sitting in front of our deployment stack.
There was literally no dimension on which AWS was better than our on-prem deployment, and as far as I was able to tell before I quit, the only reason they used AWS was because everyone else was doing it.
With all the job hopping that goes on in tech, there is a lot of Resume Driven Development. People want to use AWS because it will help them get their next job.
I'm finally in a job that I'm happy with and can see myself staying here until retirement. I have noticed that has changed my technology recommendations. For example we recently started looking at configuration management tools. Ansible is the obvious choice from a resume perspective as it is very popular. I ended recommending Powershell DSC. Why, because our environment is mostly windows, the team is familiar with Powershell, and for our use case is much faster. Powershell DSC is not as popular so it won't help me get another job. When it comes time to expand the team, I can hire someone who understands configuration management tools or powershell, and get them up to speed in a day or two.
>There was literally no dimension on which AWS was better than our on-prem deployment
The big pitch is opex vs capex. This is one of the leading "value propositions" being made to the C-suite. If you're a business that's worried about capex then opex model will look very appealling... until someone looks at how much you'll (generally) be screwed in the Opex model in the mid to long term. Most 'decision makers' in large corporations are short term oriented and the opex model ends up winning.
About a year ago, I was in a meeting with my new CEO (who had acquired my company). My side of the business had kept hardware in-house, his was in AWS. We had broadly similar businesses in the same industry and with the same kind of customers.
My side of the business needed to upgrade our 5+ year old hardware. The quote came to $100K; the CEO freaked out. I asked him how much he spent on AWS?
The answer was that they spent $30K per month on AWS.
The kicker is that we managed 10x as many customers as they did, our devops team was half the size, and we were rolling out continuous deployment while they were still struggling to automated upgrades. Our deployment environment is also far less complicated than theirs because there isn't a complex infrastructure stack sitting in front of our deployment stack.
There was literally no dimension on which AWS was better than our on-prem deployment, and as far as I was able to tell before I quit, the only reason they used AWS was because everyone else was doing it.