One company I worked for it would take literally 6 months for the internal IT organization to provision a VM and configure it to the state that it was actually usable, and they would chargeback hundreds of dollars a month for it. Physical/dedicated hardware you would need to set the wheels in motion 12-18 months in advance of when you needed it.
That IT department, I still know people there, is currently flailing desperately for a solution to the problem of the business having discovered how quick it is to provision on AWS and what it costs there, even tho' it "looks" expensive it is still a massive saving compared to the fully loaded cost of many large company's IT departments. And even if it takes an hour to spin up an instance, that is still an unbelievable miracle to people who were used to the old way. Questions are being asked for which there are no easy answers...
I've experienced that first hand. I was told it would take 3 weeks to setup and provision a VM that had IIS installed. This was a Microsoft shop, so one would assume the massive VMWare cluster they ran had dozens of instances like that.
The guys in IT couldn't understand why the devs and the rest of the business were rapidly moving to Azure...
One company I worked for it would take literally 6 months for the internal IT organization to provision a VM and configure it to the state that it was actually usable, and they would chargeback hundreds of dollars a month for it. Physical/dedicated hardware you would need to set the wheels in motion 12-18 months in advance of when you needed it.
That IT department, I still know people there, is currently flailing desperately for a solution to the problem of the business having discovered how quick it is to provision on AWS and what it costs there, even tho' it "looks" expensive it is still a massive saving compared to the fully loaded cost of many large company's IT departments. And even if it takes an hour to spin up an instance, that is still an unbelievable miracle to people who were used to the old way. Questions are being asked for which there are no easy answers...