Cloud infrastructure success is a fine balance of budget and service quality
The visual summary below is based on a post by Will Larson, who started the SRE function at Uber. His post elaborates on a "trunks and branches" model for developing infrastructure-facing teams.
It also covered an interesting perspective on the balancing act of budget and service quality. I will explain the visual summary underneath it.
An explanation of the above visual summary
Long-term cloud infrastructure success depends on balancing both elements of high Service Quality and a reasonable Investment Budget
Service Quality can get torpedoed by morale busters like non-stop grunt work, not enough engineers, etc.
Investment budget can get torpedoed by continuously high cloud costs and an excess of branch teams working on problems that aren't solving immediate problems
The key is to always keep an eye on these "busters" that can torpedo your long-term return on cloud investment