I'm going to buck the trend and say cloud is great. We do cloud, on-prem and colo (16 racks in two different DCs). Procurement is a nightmare especially when

I'm going to buck the trend and say cloud is great. We do cloud, on-prem and colo (16 racks in two different DCs). Procurement is a nightmare especially when your vendor is having problems with yields (thanks Intel!) and the ability to scale up and scale down without going through hardware procurement process saves us millions of dollars a year. We avoid the lock-in by running on basic services on multiple cloud providers and building on top of those agnostically. Spend is in the millions per month between the cloud providers, but the discounts are steep. We're essentially had to build our own global CDN and the costs are better than paying the CDN services and better than running our own hardware & staffing all those locales. It's a no brainer. We'll continue to operate mixed infrastructure for quite some time as certain things make sense in certain places.