(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.) The key piece that's missing here is the idea that risk is som

(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.) The key piece that's missing here is the idea that risk is something you have to compare, and can combine in interesting ways, then trade off against costs. There are a bunch of ways in which you can do compute, storage, and networking. You get to pick zero or more of these ways. One of them is "buy a bunch of iron and make a pile of it in your bedroom". Major risk factors here are your house burning down, you getting evicted, or there being a power cut. Another is "rent those services from an infrastructure provider". Risk factors here are much harder for you to visualise, but include things like "governments ban that company from operating in your country". You can look at the risk of any of these options, and quantify it with an SLO, like "we intend for this compute resource to be available 99.99% of the time in a given quarter". You can then have an SLA that defines what will happen if that objective is not met, and measure how often this is complied with over time. There are lots of ways to analyse this information, but let's suppose that you can reduce it to a single number measuring how safe the resource is for your use case. If you only look at a single option, and say "this has a safety of X", then the only thing you can get out of this effort is anxiety. This only becomes interesting when you start looking at differences between alternatives, like "the safety of servers in my bedroom is X, but the safety of buying resources on GCE is Y, so I can get this much of an improvement by spending that amount of money", or "by doing both of these things I improve my safety to Z, and I am willing to pay the additional cost of doing so". Or perhaps your position would be "this option is less safe but much cheaper and I'm willing to accept the extra risk". The problem I have with the "fuck the cloud" article is that it doesn't do any of this. All it says is "the safety of this option is only X, you should experience anxiety". Is X higher or lower than that pile of iron in your bedroom? You still don't know. (Realistically, unless you have the ability to build a system in your bedroom that has continental diversity for storage, N+2 of everything for hardware failure, etc, your bedroom is likely to be far less safe than the major cloud services - unless you live in a country which regularly bans American companies from doing business with you, which a sixth of the world's population does.)