>As a startup CTO, I agree you need networking And cybersecurity. I am not sure if you need fulltime people specializing in this though.

highly depends on function of the service and it's scale

>I used to work for large companies with big on-prem footprint. Networking and security in that world is a different game and warrants dedicated people.

>But for a startup with two services running in the cloud, with so many out of the box tools? (IDS, WAF, log based monitoring, SDN and all the configurability that comes with it). That can go a long way, without dedicated people.

maybe for network. but in my experience most of engineering (starting with junior developers and ending with vp/cto level) doesn't understand cybersecurity specifically or security in general . so even if there is tooling available, people don't understand when, how or most important why to use them.

Sorry, this won't cut it anymore. You would loose all the fun instabilities when the cluster is upgraded again, the round trip times could not be optimized by distributing things further, the magic of all the different translation layers between you and the hardware would vanish. Worst of all is not all the money and headache you would save but you also would save time. Why would you do that?

in higher management there is aversion to any spend on physical stuff. where i work, we as everywhere look to cut costs. one of ways allowed to save ~$1.5M on aws costs over 5 years, by one time investment of $150k into physical equipment. It fell through.

The other aspect it's that somebody needs to manage old PC. usually there needs to be a team managing this infra and it creates friction between developers and infra team. so devs run into cloud and try to manage everything on cloud themselves. but at some point arrives consolidation and new team dedicated to managing same infra in aws.

> Can't we just buy an old PC and put it in the office and run dev builds on that

It's cheaper to pay for those cloud resources than hiring 2-3 more people.