The premise cloud has been sold to business stakeholders under has been dramatically reduced cost mainly through not having to staff up for a number of technical positions, and it works for certain use cases. But I'm not seeing real payoffs for many less-tactical, broad-scale use cases.

What appears to happen is the "get going coding" part is dramatically accelerated, that saves on the order of days of waiting; a few weeks/months if new tech stacks the organization hasn't worked with before are in play. But man, once in production, I'm still puzzling over how to manage the operational costs.

There is a huge disconnect in the business community in their perception of cloud that I'm collaborating with. They're taking the delivered "get coding fast" benefits which do save time and money. They see we're only paying for infrastructure the moment devs start hammering fingers to keyboards so to speak, and not waiting around for teams to stand up that infrastructure and paying for all of that while it's not delivering benefit. They take that experience and are applying the same expectations to the operational, production support side.

I don't know how others are doing it delivering on the operational and production support benefits, but nowhere near the same scale of savings are happening so far for teams I work with. What I'm experiencing is while there are marginal savings on the nodes of services (the actual service itself), we're adding a lot to staff payroll at high-end pay scales and spending a lot of their time on all the connections and complexity between them; between troubleshooting and adding new capabilities (more troubleshooting), it is eating up a lot of expensive staff time.

I'm pushing for greater automation through DevOps, but that's encountering lots of resistance now with the economic outlook because DevOps generates a net increase in absolute payroll even with a marginal decrease in operational staffing once the automation is burned-in. In fact, because automation takes away the mundane operational aspects, we end up having to cost-justify far more capable and expensive operational staff that can handle the corner-cases that emerge as business-as-usual activity, after automation ate away all the usual cases. While headcount goes down, total payroll goes up, and budget-watchers resist the idea that they're saving overall by delivering more stable, consistent, quality service with more feature points per dollar, and if we continue to carry on the old way our costs would be easily triple to order of magnitude more. This is a marketing/education perception problem to work upon nearly daily.

I love working with the cloud tech stack, but at the end of the day I have to show my business stakeholders it really did save net budget. For judiciously-targeted and considered projects where I've had a lot of input tactically it has worked really well for them and me. For strategic-level "Cloud All The Things!!@!%!" initiatives, the cost savings get way murkier to discern; this is the perception problem on steroids. I'd love links to detailed readings from people who have been in the trenches of successful strategic-scale "we went to the cloud whole hog" efforts, describing the traps and pitfalls to avoid and how they showed a net benefit.