The conventional thinking treats infrastructure as capital expenditure, as the cost of doing business just like bakers need ovens to make breads. But with the advent of cloud technology, that equation changes dramatically. Yes, a baker still needs ovens to make breads, but they certainly don't need milling machine to make flour or heavy machineries to make baking pans. There are other people who spent millions of dollars who can do the jobs better.
In fact, in the age of cloud computing, I'd argue that infrastructures are not just expenditure, they are debt. Because for every dollar you spend on infrastructure, you're obligated to service the new infrastructure, hire and train people to maintain them, constantly pamper the infrastructure like pets to make sure there's no outage or downtime. By the time your operation is smoothed out, your once shiny state-of-the-art infrastructure is a thing of the past, something else newer and shinier is available.
What's more, these are just the visible costs. The devil hides in the details for many people will resist change and hold on to existing infrastructure and make engineers to work around it. This not only impedes speed, performance and innovation, it takes a toll on the people as well. That's why I believe calculating the true cost of infrastructure is an art, not science since some of these costs can never be truly measured.
On-prem infrastructure had a great run in the nineties and early 2000's because the IT industry was exploding but the internet connection was slow and unreliable. Every company had to set up servers, networks, operating systems and admin tools in order to do business. Nowadays, the internet enables us to stay connected to another machine anywhere in the world. Infrastructure has become an industry just like factories on the other side of the world. IaaS providers certainly don't treat infrastructure as debt because it is how they make money, and they are willing to invest ever more money in it while we pay a fair price to reap the rewards.
So, next time before you buy anything new, think about whether it is cost or debt. It may surprise you how it changes the way you view the world.
