> I don't understand, even after using cloud at work, what those cloud systems provide that can't be done, better, cheaper, and with less relying on a single or

> I don't understand, even after using cloud at work, what those cloud systems provide that can't be done, better, cheaper, and with less relying on a single organisation, on dedicated service providers. You're pretty much spot on, technically. Anything they can do, you can do better, faster, smarter, more streamlined, etc, outside of some core competencies. It's hard to do BigTable better than Google, and my Paxos is just gonna be worse than what a few decades of 'mission critical' at Microsoft will create. The reason these are viable in the market, though, isn't technical: it's Time To Market and capital expenditures. For a SaaS company "The Cloud" is a dead end in the long run because it costs too much, but it's golden in the short term because you throw a few credit card numbers at the issue and you're up and running. You scale, make money, scale more, make more money, and then use your half-decades head start on the competition to bring down your costs. Anything that's not working gets turned off, and you've only lost operating costs without some huge hardware investment. The commercial cloud is not about running things 24/7 cheaper than your datacenter, the commercial cloud is about letting you pretend you have a datacenter while you get your unicorn to an IPO ;) For investors, CTOs, CIOs, and CEOs the picture is one of transition, not permanence [0]: > Even if we believe the world is going gaga for cloud - and I do - there are different flavours of cloud, with SaaS comprising a two-thirds of all public cloud spending, by IDC’s estimates. As for those SaaS vendors, they’re running lots (and lots) of VMware. As one insider at a large SaaS provider shared with me, their model is to run on public cloud when they enter a new region, then switch to private data centre once they hit a revenue threshold ($50m). - [0] - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/11/kubernetes_envy/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/11/kubernetes_envy/