I’d ask, “have we worked together?” since this is a spot on description of my former employer, except it’s probably a spot on description of thousands of mid sized companies.
Same! Some execs get excited about reducing capital expenses for a data center and the teams that manage it. Some CTO gets excited about the flexibility and some legitimate benefits of cloud.
But it ends up costing a shitton of money to switch paradigms completely, and they don't switch paradigms completely for a number of years: If you're just migrating servers to ec2/vpc, you're doing cloud wrong.
Of course, there is the idea of cloud agnostic, or even multi region, which seems a challenge for most places.
At least with terraform, it is theoretically easier to swing configurations over to a different host.
At many places I've worked, there are essentially zero checks-and-balances between "Exec gets randomly excited about X" and "X becomes a mandate, with staffing, budget, and deadline." No technical vetting, feedback loop, sometimes no apparent coordination with other execs (and their random ideas). It's just: "Mike is excited about Cloud. -> We are now doing Cloud." Later, Mike gets excited about something else, and the entire team moves over to something else. "Mike is excited about AI. -> We are now doing AI."
