In my previous role, my manager argued for my work as a developer to be charged as Capex to the project instead of Opex.
Why would accountants want the opposite for AWS?
CAPEX items are amortized over multiple fiscal cycles; it’ll count and can helps raise the value(valuation) of your company, but tricker to calculate.
So depending what financial number goals your company has, the accounting of items can go one way or the other.
If your dev work brought permanent value to the company, then it can be capex. If you were a contractor instead, it could be either cap or opex. AWS services are basically rented and not permanent value to the company, ie, if you sold everything the company owned for cash, you couldn’t sell the AWS part, just the terraform scripts.
Cost wise Capex are depreciated, this gives less visibility on month on month costs compared with opex which goes onto income statement.
Developer work as capex is intangible asset, which has a bit more 'flexibility' depending on what management wants. It can operate on the same idea, developer wages for 1 year spread over several years via amortization of intangible asset.
Now say you want to spin up a new feature/product. Can you accurately forecast the compute needs? How difficult would it be to get a large capex PO out through your internal orgs on the unreleased non-revenue functionality.
Compare that to cloud where you pay for what you need. Calculating marginal cost is much easier, and securing budget on an ongoing basis to pay for clouds opex is also much easier, as you can easily show to finance the profit margins.
