My last three employments have had me and my team build three different platforms with three different “providers”. Many lessons learned! Chronological order:

My last three employments have had me and my team build three different platforms with three different “providers”. Many lessons learned! Chronological order: 1. E-commerce, low volume (1000-5000RPM), very high value conversions, highly localized trade. We built an on-prem stack using hasicorp here. This place had on-prem stuff already in place, the usual vendor driven crap - expensive hypervisor, expensive spoffy SAN, unreliable network. Anyway, my platform team (4-5 guys) built a silo on commodity hardware to run the new version of this site. This is a few years back, but the power you get from cheap hardware these days is astounding. With 6 basic servers, in two DCs, stuffed with off the shelf SSDs we could run the site and dev teams no problem. Much less downtime compared to the expensive hyperconverged blade crap we started on at basically no cost. There’s a simplicity that wins out using actual network cables and 1u boxes... LXC is awesome btw! Using “legacy” vmware, emc, hp etc for non-essential on-prem? Cloud is tempting! 2. Very high volume (Billions of requests per day), global network. AWS. Team tasked with improving on-demand scalability. We implemented kubernetes on AWS and it really showed what it’s about! After 6-7 months of struggle with k8s < 1.12 things turned around when it hit 1.12-1.13-ish we got it to act how we wanted. Sort of, at least. Cloud just a no brainer for this type of round-the-clock, elastic workload. You’d need many millions up-front to even begin building something matching “the cloud” here. Lot of work spent tweaking cost though. At this scale cloud cost management is what you do. 3. Upstart dev-shop. No rpm outside dev (yet). Azure. About 30 devs building cool stuff. Azure sucks as IaaS, they want you to PaaS that’s for sure. Cloud decision had been made already when I joined. Do you need cloud for this? No. Are there benefits? Some. Do they outweigh the cost? Hardly. In the end it will depend on how and where your product drives revenue. We pay for a small local dev datacenter quarterly, which i find annoying. Just some quick thoughts off the top of my head (on the phone so excuse everything). Happy to discuss further!