IBM cloud is a joke. That's why I put it in there. The aforementioned executive was clearly not thinking. There's nothing you've written that I disagree with

IBM cloud is a joke. That's why I put it in there. The aforementioned executive was clearly not thinking. There's nothing you've written that I disagree with. It's easy to do the math that shows where bare metal saves money inclusive of the labor costs. For some reason most everyone seems to fail at it. I could expound one why, but this: >I remember how hard it was to hire senior operations people. There are not many of them, and there are not many of them at the level of being able to deliver something amazing. The ubiquity of the cloud has only made these kind of experts less common. Those folks just don't exist. Building infra is more than just buying infra. It takes actual development, which is why I think so many fail at it. Your anecdote about Dropbox is telling. They adopted cloud, and more importantly cloud methodologies and then went back to bare metal. There are others that have done the same. I recall a talk at an Openstack conference given by Verizon in which they described their approach. Developers begin in AWS, utilize a cloud-based approach, and then when cost concerns become an issue, they aim to offer similar services in-house on bare-metal.