Engineering is always balancing capabilities and costs. Before AWS existed there were plenty of stories about people over-buying to handle peak loads, optimizing workloads to fit a particular budget (especially during the dotcom era when VCs stopped underwriting huge sales for Sun, et al.), etc.
Cloud services gave new options for variable use and reallocating management costs but they also did something which most places were not used to: expose every detail as an itemized bill. That makes costs more visible than they’d been for most organizations which is good in the sense that people can make architectural decisions with pretty detailed numbers but bad in that many CIOs get sticker shock unless they’d done a well above average job calculating on-premise TCO.
Cloud services gave new options for variable use and reallocating management costs but they also did something which most places were not used to: expose every detail as an itemized bill. That makes costs more visible than they’d been for most organizations which is good in the sense that people can make architectural decisions with pretty detailed numbers but bad in that many CIOs get sticker shock unless they’d done a well above average job calculating on-premise TCO.