Personally, I'd rather have capex than opex. My observations from working with, and in the "cloud": The "cloud" does benefit from it's scale in many ways. It

Personally, I'd rather have capex than opex. My observations from working with, and in the "cloud": The "cloud" does benefit from it's scale in many ways. It has more engineers to improve, fix, watch, and page. It has more resources to handle spikes, whales, and demand. Almost everything is scale tested and the actual physical limits are known. It is damn right impressive to see what kind of traffic the cloud can handle. Everything in the "cloud" is abstracted which increases complexity. Knowledgeable engineers are few and far between. As an engineer you assume something will break, and with every deployment you hope that you have the right metrics in place and alarms on the right metrics. The "cloud" is best suited for whales. From special pricing to resource provisioning, they get the best. The rest is trickled down. Most services are cost-centers. Very few can actually pay for the team and the cost of its dependencies. It's insane how much VC money is spent building whatever the latest trend of application architecture is. Very few actually hit their utilization projections.