I didn't find it so offensive (adblock), and the advice actually seems pretty spot-on with my experience. 1) yes it's easy to prototype in cloud, and it's also

I didn't find it so offensive (adblock), and the advice actually seems pretty spot-on with my experience. 1) yes it's easy to prototype in cloud, and it's also easy to fall into the trap of vendor lock-in. Instead, if you are based in the USA (which sadly I'm not), check on ebay, there's plenty of refurbished or liquidated equipment at a fraction of brand-new pricing. BTW, the latter should also be an indicator that not all is fluffy in cloud-land...! 2) 100% agree on this. Fintech is rearing its ugly head, with 100's (1000's?) of startups all trying to get a pie of the consumer. I subscribe to the GNU/KISS philosophy. Keep it simple, keep it as a set of known tools which speak a common "API" (whether that's just plain and simple text, XML, JSON etc), train my guys to understand and use them, and you will achieve far more productivity than jumping every few months to yet-another-you-beaut toolset guaranteed to solve your CI problems (until after 6 months, you find out their business strategy is to get acquired, at which point in time you spend another 6 months adopting another tool... and another...) 3) If anybody has ever seen the power of dtrace, or even what a straightforward systems/network monitoring system can capture e.g. zabbix, then they would definitely agree that monitoring is key to ensure the health of the system(s). Once you get past a whole bunch of scripting alerts on one server, and wonder how to scale it, then bump into nagios/zabbix etc, you will kick yourself for not having done so sooner!