Cloud and Devops: eliminating an entire layer of assholes

I've been in quite a few gigantic enterprises. Medical, Insurance, Retail, Government, you name it.

Without exception, in every one of these organizations the infrastructure teams function as blights upon innovation and adaptability, and impose unreasonable costs and delays. Infrastructure is not simple, I will grant... and this is not revelatory news to anyone in the industry.

It used to be, oh, say, a decade ago that we heard only rumors of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other firms with dynamic, adaptive, cost-effective, anticipatory, and plentiful infrastructure for testing, prototyping, and production. No nightmares of 8 extra GB of RAM costing $1,000, or a simple PC server carrying $10,000 / year in upkeep chargebacks.

Once rumors, AWS / Rackspace / Google Compute and a host of other cloud providers have made that a much more stark contrast to anyone mired in internal infrastructure. Once things like Chef and other automated provisioning come into play, the contrast becomes even more pronounced.

Again, none of this is revelatory. Clouds are better cost, more adaptive, efficient, allow you to discover new technologies and make those practical to your job, group, and enterprise. Anyone who has done a cloud-enabled project has experienced the nirvana... But only now when we are being cast back into the rats nest of mandated internal infrastructure use do I recall all those meetings and emails and total clusterfucks:

• your RAM is too big, we can't support more than 8GB. Oh, you want 4GB? That will be $1000/year extra
• oh, you need another 100 MB of disk space, that will be $1000/year. No we won't provision you extra space, you have to crash in production and then raise a ticket to get us to do anything.
• Let's schedule 10 meetings to discuss minor hardware spec increases that should be 1/100 of the labor waste of the meetings
• Hardware guys bloviate about what your application's hardware spec requirements are, even though they have NO IDEA about what it does or its user base
• CPU? You like 386s right? 
• Oh, your VM is colocated with other extremely high use VMs? Too bad, so sad.
• SSD? What is that?
• Cloud? We have an internal cloud. No we don't have elastic storage or API provisioning. We can get your new VM up in 5 months rather than 1 year!
• Accounting... ah, the accounting. "It's free... if you can get it". "It has no upkeep cost, but it costs a ton to setup". "Will the cost drop over time as Moore's Law marches on? NO". 

I am so fucking sick of it. Thus I DECLARE:

The #1 Feature of Clouds is the Elimination of an Entire Layer of Assholes From Your Life

That's right. #1 feature by far. No one from our cloud provider has ever sent us threatening emails yanking our RAM size, or down-specced our machines without consultation, or dragged their feet to provide new machines, disk space, CPU, whatever. Or spent weeks ignoring tickets behind ticket walls. No one scheduling bloviating meetings and handing down arbitrary new policies from above. No meddling in your application architecture. No complaints to the CEO if you decide to use someone else's infrastructure. None of it.

Not just any arbitrary layer of assholes. Infrastructure lends itself to controlling and sociopathic shitheads. They get to ooh and aah over high-spec machines, they get large lump-sum budget line items, and, best of all, they get to lord over the distribution of those resources to the people that need them, and demand asskissing and tribute. This is a particularly obnoxious layer of entitled, intractable, petulant assholes you are extricating from your life.

What is the #1 downside of our collective profession? Stress. Stress that causes measurable, documented deleterious health effects. If you can identify something that significantly reduces that stress, and I argue clouds can do that, then it should be a priority: personally, professionally, and industry-wide.