So I'm not a cloud advocate. For the present company we use the cloud because we, as a company do not have the skills or the ability to run our own infrastructu

So I'm not a cloud advocate. For the present company we use the cloud because we, as a company do not have the skills or the ability to run our own infrastructure properly. We have three physical datacenters. in terms of cost for us, its about 3-8 times more expensive, side by side AWS vs hosted tin. The problem is this; Raw metal is much, much faster and more efficient. but the tooling to make it HA, scalable and monitored >> than the cost of hosting in AWS. (specifically migrating the ~3000 instances from 6+ config systems into a homogeneous platform) Having worked for a beautifully integrated high scale (36k servers, 15pb storage) company, where everything was real steel and well monitored and automated, it makes my heart bleed paying through the nose for shitty VMs with even shittier storage. However, Having to deal with half-arsed VMware/kvm integrations is far far worse than dealing with AWS. Or worse, dealing with a shitty puppet wrapper for tungsten.