> You could hire 100+ engineers and still save money compared to a 65M bill
I see cloud costs like this a lot and it really puzzles me. It seems like people would rather pay 10X+ more to just not have to think about it than even to hire other people to think about it, because then you have to think about hiring and HR.
"Here's a blank check. Just make it go away."
Of course corporate consultants run on that, so I guess it's not without abundant precedent elsewhere. I guess if you work for a big company with budget and it's not your money you really have little incentive not to take the easy path.
This is indeed the case and one can argue that it makes sense for a small company to focus on the MVP and initial growth. But every such decision needs to be reexamined from time to time as the company scales up. That is unpleasant, requires an expert, so many businesses procrastinate on this and make expensive mistakes. My 2c.
Operational costs can be billed to a project. It's not really that the business doesn't want to save money on this stuff, but it's much easier to wind up in this situation when the loops to hire some engineers are 4x as complicated as just adding another sub-org to the data dog billing..
I would argue it's a much easier blank check to write than for consultants. Software complexity over time is a major headache and new initiatives happen all the time.
Take for instance GDPR - in AWS it was a company wide effort to get all the services GDPR compliant and that was basically a non-existent pricing change to consumers.
Also the fact that I can call up AWS support and have them look into a bug immediately with real devs on the other end is invaluable when my business needs rely on a certain feature working.
I see cloud costs like this a lot and it really puzzles me. It seems like people would rather pay 10X+ more to just not have to think about it than even to hire other people to think about it, because then you have to think about hiring and HR.
"Here's a blank check. Just make it go away."
Of course corporate consultants run on that, so I guess it's not without abundant precedent elsewhere. I guess if you work for a big company with budget and it's not your money you really have little incentive not to take the easy path.