I joined this company to build out a software stack for being able to do disaster recovery of sites off site. This resulted in building a system that takes incr

I joined this company to build out a software stack for being able to do disaster recovery of sites off site. This resulted in building a system that takes incremental backups of client systems and uploading them to our servers. In a DR event we would spin up VMs backed by the images we had copied to our servers. Throughout the processes the word "cloud" was brought up. Who's cloud would we use? Over and over again I tried to explain we were actually building a "cloud" service. And by that I mean we are just offering a service that runs on our servers. Due to the feature set and cost we ended up settling on bare metal servers from SoftLayer (IBM). The entire solutions has been made to run on commodity hardware. For the longest time the company kept marking that we were using "IMBs Cloud". Every now and then I get a request to ask what it would take to move to AWS. My response is always the same. More operating budget, and less features. We spin up DR environments for many servers2 in seconds -- and can do so because we have full control over the hypervisor, so moving to anything like AWS, Azure, or what not means we give up the ability for near instance restore. Owning the entire stack has its own set of problems, but in the long run we should be able to move much faster. "The Cloud" -> "The Internet"