Big public clouds have a genuine purpose but there is a shit-ton of marketing and FUD being thrown around about them -- I'd bet my hat that's what this post is,

Big public clouds have a genuine purpose but there is a shit-ton of marketing and FUD being thrown around about them -- I'd bet my hat that's what this post is, given the phrasing up top. I'm not a fan. In short: Cost. CapEx and depreciation vs. OpEx. The numbers look amazing for ~3 years until the credits and discounts wear off. Then it's just high OpEx costs forever. Meanwhile I can depreciate my $10k server over time and get some cash back in taxes; plus it's paid for after a couple years -- $0 OpEx outside of licenses, and CentOS has no license cost. Once you have significant presence in someone's cloud, they're not going to just lower costs either -- they've got you now. What in American Capitalism circa 2020 makes you think they won't find a way to nickle and dime you to death? It's not going to reduce headcount, either. Instead of 14 devops/sysadmins, now I have 14 cloud admins, sitting pretty with their Azure or GCP certs. Automation is what's going to reduce those headcounts and costs, and Ansible+Jenkins+Kubernetes works fine just with VMware, Docker, and Cisco on-prem. Trust. The Google Cloud just had a 12-hour outage -- I first read about it here on HN. AWS and Azure have had plenty of outages too... usually they're just not as open as Google is about it. You also have to trust that they won't get back-doored like what happened to NordVPN's providers, and that they're not secretly MITM'ing everything or dup-ing your data. We (and some of our clients) compete with some of the cloud providers companies and their subsidiaries, and we know for a fact that they will investigate and siphon any data that could give them an advantage. Purpose. We just don't need hyper-scalable architecture. We've got a (mostly) fixed number of users in a fixed number of locations, with needs that are fairly easy to estimate / build for. Outside of a handful of sales & financial processing purposes, we will never scale up or down in any dramatic fashion. And for the one-off cases, we can either make it work with VMware, or outsource it to the software provider's SaaS cloud offering. If we were doing e-commerce -- absolutely. Some sort of android app? Sure, AWS or Azure would be great. But it's a lot of risk and cost with no benefit for the Enterprise orgs than can afford their own stuff.