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Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

Forgot to mention - if you were doing anything new, plan to spend months getting that in on-prem. They're going to run an RFP, deliberate ad nauseam, try to build a business case the tool, procure infrastructure to host it, do five year usage projections so you can measure how you're going to capitalize - it just goes on, and on.

Our organization spent two years going through these gyrations for elastic search. They failed. It never happened. No other solution was brought on board, they simply couldn't justify the cost. All told they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to come up empty-handed. Meanwhile my new team had a project where elastic search was the obvious component as part of the solution and we simply used that service on AWS. Done.

It's been a while since I've worked at a startup or a mid-cap company, but for any company in the Fortune 500? Cloud is a godsend!

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Sure. Come back to us in twelve months.

Either the company will have lost control of their spending and be sending 6-7 figure paychecks towards AWS. Or the ops team will have clamped down on the accounts and now you have to go trough the same process to get EC2 instances and other cloud resources.

Solving cultural problems with technology generally doesn't work.

> Solving cultural problems with technology generally doesn't work.

Solving cultural problems is indeed difficult but most of us are not going to be at a company long enough to give a shit. The name of they game is taking money off the table and the best way to do that is to deliver value quickly and then move to the next table.

> The name of they game is taking money off the table and the best way to do that is to deliver value quickly and then move to the next table.

I pity the fool who hired you. Or will hire you, for that matter.

It's been 4 years for our team? Maybe in 12 years things will be different, but this is where we are for now.

> Solving cultural problems with technology generally doesn't work.

That's a ridiculous statement! Technology is the prime driver of culture! If you want to effect lasting change, the last thing you should do is try to convince people you are right. Set up the technical infrastructure to support the culture you want!

In fact, it's the reverse — culture has practically no impact on technology once deployed.

Right. The society today is defined by technology. I like to call it "the smartphone society" instead of "the modern society" or whatever.

> Solving cultural problems with technology generally doesn't work.

It does by getting rid of the people.

Yes, it only pushes the inevitable lean battle further down the road and never solves anything. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Yeah. The - possibly insoluble - problem is that if you don't go through all the approvals exercises, the people whose time would be taken up approving your thing are still there, drawing a salary. So there's no obvious cost/benefit analysis to do, or not one that's politik.

But I like the idea of just doing it using cloud. Once a cloud vendor is approved, all its services are implicitly approved as well. Nice.

> Once a cloud vendor is approved, all its services are implicitly approved as well. Nice.

Exactly! When we start a new project the AWS Console is just a big tool box we open to see what's available that we can use to deliver the solution.

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