Am I missing something here? Is your point that everyone should move to the public cloud because you think it's "difficult" to build a "private" one? Sorry to

Am I missing something here? Is your point that everyone should move to the public cloud because you think it's "difficult" to build a "private" one? Sorry to be blunt, but are you joking, an idiot or just completely unaware of the reality our industry outside of startup land? Forgetting the compliance reasons, or that I have zero confidence that a combination of giant American corporations have any interest in protecting my data and that of my users, forgetting also that the performance differences are incredibly significant (take 8 15k sas's in raid 10 vs.. what? EBS with 2k 'provisioned IOPS' on a shared san over iscsi?), the cost savings are much more significant than you claim here. I recently bought a half rack load of dell boxes which have like 380GB of ram each and 52 threads, and they cost around £4k each. Even with a whole army of overpriced ops dudes to install openstack or kubernetes on all that, the cost we spent would be spanked in a month on AWS for similar capacity, and mine isn't a recurring one. Why does it have to be so black and white for you folks? A "private cloud" is absolutely the correct choice for a lot of people. If I were you I'd quietly delete that post, because I've absolutely judged you -- and probably unfairly -- on the content. On that, I wouldn't hire you. Listen, both these things have a place, but they're NOT competing in the minds of those of us running serious infra. AWS allows us to prototype apps rapidly, to put project work on a credit card associated with a specific project budget instead of spending the shared budget, and for sure there are some nice services which do a bit of heavy lifting for us which helps speed that up. After that phase though, very, very few people things actually need or make sense to stay there once it becomes a real product. Your scaling concerns are not being well served by 1000s of ec2 instances. Moving back in house is usually the smarter option. If you're pumping loads of data into the internet, then you should be behind a CDN and the origin shouldn't be smashed to the point where you're dependent on throwing compute into the void to cope. Akamai or CloudFlare are cheaper than deploying 100s of ec2's because some shitty code can't handle your traffic. If data is coming in, read a book on queues; you'd be pretty surprised what you can do with even two 1U boxes and a good software architecture. We could handle 100k+/sec of messages back in the java 1.5 and activemq days with 1U sparc boxes; how much do you recon it costs to do that today in AWS? tl;dr - urgh. lets' talk in 10 years. </rant>