alt Hacker NewsAt my previous startup: because AWS gave us a bunch of credits and helped us design the infra. It meant we ran for free what they designed for free.
At a previous bigger company, getting procurement to sign up to a new provider requires writing a business case, justifying the spend and then getting multiple competing quotes and speaking to their sales teams. Signing up to a new service takes _months_ even for $10/mo as they’ll negotiate for bulk discounts and the best possible terms for something that will literally cost less per year than one of meetings they hold to discuss the “value”. Meanwhile on AWS I can click a button in the marketplace and it gets thrown in the AWS account which is pre approved spending.
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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.
Have seen this repeatedly also.
Watched one company end up with a $250k AWS bill when their credits expired (which they could not pay).
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.