Me: This vendor software you purchased is not going to scale well on EC2, it needs physical hardware to work well.
Boss: Well, we don't have time to go purchase physical hardware and get it racked. That'll take 3 months.
...3 months later...
Boss: This stuff isn't scaling, we need to all come in over the weekend to work out the kinks with the production servers.
Me: Purchase some hardware and get it racked. EC2 just isn't working out.
Boss: I can't. I already sold our executive team on the cloud and we don't have room in our budget for hardware.
A lot of places rent out physical hardware, meaning you won't have to buy it. It might take more time if you have specific needs, but some providers can deploy hardware in minutes.
Agreed. I knew his 3 months excuse was a straw man argument but I wasn't in IT so I couldn't argue against it.
The truth came out only after another 3 months of failed scaling when we found out that he'd oversold the benefits of cloud based scaling to the nontechnical leadership.
...3 months later...
Boss: This stuff isn't scaling, we need to all come in over the weekend to work out the kinks with the production servers. Me: Purchase some hardware and get it racked. EC2 just isn't working out. Boss: I can't. I already sold our executive team on the cloud and we don't have room in our budget for hardware.
...Another 3 months go by... Boss is gone.