The structure of the company depends on the needs.
When you have a tiny Corp IT, almost invisible in a company's annual budget, and nobody in the company wants to care about it (a lot of pain but zero rewards) -> it goes to CFO.
You have Corp IT as a major cost center which is bigger than all the other spending altogether (mature IT companies) then you want someone knowledgeable and trustable to run it, usually CIO.
Sometimes, Corp IT as internal infrastructure supporting employees, development, backoffice is under the same person running production for the clients. Then standards of the internal IT and external services are the same (and very hard for internal services to achieve).
In other cases, production and corp IT are different departments with not so funny unresolvable collisions, like buying incompatible hardware for testing environment (internal services) and production.
> They are showing no difference between on demand and reserved pricing, with reserved pricing often even being more expensive.
That's exactly what is happening when you look at things without depreciation. You pay 3y all upfront. And it's a lot of money: a high step on the graph. On demand will grow steadily and in three years, it will surely be higher than 3y reserved instance. But we are not comparing one instance. We add more ever more powerful servers as they are added in any infrastructure. And we pay upfront. On demand price can't catch up to those all upfront costs on our period of time.
To see it clearly, we fix the infra on the 4th graph. And then on-demand becomes much more expensive.
Also, you may look at the last paragraph in the Appendix to see why 3y all upfront is not horizontal between the steps.
> Are they actually taking the full 3-year up-front cost and comparing it to monthly on-demand pricing?
Netflix is a flagship example of AWS usage. https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/innovators/net...
We don't know what are Netflix discounts. Maybe Netflix uses AWS just for free to make others pay. Maybe AWS even pay to Netflix to continue attracting the other guys.
On the other hand, just read this disclosure in the Netflix 2023 annual financial report:
"We have architected our software and computer systems so as to utilize data processing, storage capabilities and other services provided by AWS... Given this, along with the fact that we cannot easily switch our AWS operations to another cloud provider, any disruption of or interference with our use of AWS would impact our operations and our business would be adversely impacted. While the retail side of Amazon competes with us, we do not believe that Amazon will use the AWS operation in such a manner as to gain competitive advantage against our service, although if it were to do so it could harm our business."
This is a new type of conflict of interests.
I assumed only good intentions from IT guys.
But you're right that some of them may be more interested in complexity of used solutions, bigger budgets, and their personal job security than in company results and sustainability.
When you have a tiny Corp IT, almost invisible in a company's annual budget, and nobody in the company wants to care about it (a lot of pain but zero rewards) -> it goes to CFO. You have Corp IT as a major cost center which is bigger than all the other spending altogether (mature IT companies) then you want someone knowledgeable and trustable to run it, usually CIO.
Sometimes, Corp IT as internal infrastructure supporting employees, development, backoffice is under the same person running production for the clients. Then standards of the internal IT and external services are the same (and very hard for internal services to achieve).
In other cases, production and corp IT are different departments with not so funny unresolvable collisions, like buying incompatible hardware for testing environment (internal services) and production.