True, but you can also spin up replicas in your cloud providers' nearest regions. Everybody talks about capacity elasticity, but easy geographical distribution

True, but you can also spin up replicas in your cloud providers' nearest regions. Everybody talks about capacity elasticity, but easy geographical distribution is the much cooler property of public clouds IMO. I could drive to a local colocation site and maintain my own boxes if it came to that, but having dozens of datacenters around the world would be physically impossible for me otherwise. Of course your applications have to support that, but if they can be distributed across in-office servers then they already do.