Yesterday at 10:00 AM, I was pulled into an urgent "Strategic Infrastructure AlignmentAlignmentForcing everyone to nod on a Zoom call so no single individual takes the blame when it fails." meeting. The mandate was to drastically reduce our escalating AWS Transit Gateway and NAT gateway costs by routing our inter-site traffic back through physical edge firewalls.
The burn-rate timer hit $5,600 before anyone on the call realized the absolute irony of what we were doing.
Here is what actually happened.
Three years ago, during the height of the "Cloud-First" purge, I was explicitly ordered to unrack a pair of perfectly functional, enterprise-grade physical firewalls. Despite my protests that we would still need on-premOn-PremThat dusty server rack in the closet that nobody has the password to anymore. edge security, the CIO declared them "legacy." I was forced to wipe their configs and sell them to an e-waste liquidator for pennies on the dollar to prove our commitment to the cloudThe CloudSomeone else's computer that we are now paying a 400% premium to use..
Now, the cloudThe CloudSomeone else's computer that we are now paying a 400% premium to use. egress feesEgress FeesThe extortionate ransom the vendor charges you just to look at your own company's data. are destroying the quarterly budget. So, the PMO panicked and assembled a massive task force. They dragged two network architects, three "cloud economists," a Scrum MasterScrum MasterA meeting coordinator who asks you 'what are your blockers' every morning at 9:00 AM., and the VP of Infrastructure onto a 90-minute Webex to plan the immediate "repatriation" of our routing edge.
For an hour and a half, we sat on a bridge analyzing the Bill of Materials (BOM) to re-order the exact same model of firewall that I was forced to throw away in 2023.
Except now, thanks to inflation and supply chain issues, the exact same silicon costs 40% more and has a 120-day shipping delay. We didn't optimize our hybrid strategy yesterday. We spent over five thousand dollars in payroll to authorize buying our own trash back at a massive premium, while pretending it was a visionary leadership decision.
Total waste generated: $5,600.
Next time the PMO schedules a sync to strategically undo their own strategy from three years ago, don't point out the hypocrisy. Just mute your microphone, accept the calendar invite, and start the timer.
