I find it fascinating that cloud has become almost a synonym for rapid provisioning and VPS based systems. I think this is really short sighted. Having a great

I find it fascinating that cloud has become almost a synonym for rapid provisioning and VPS based systems. I think this is really short sighted. Having a great uptime or latency does not automatically follow from being able to spin up tons of servers. And being able to provision dedicated servers in hours is still pretty magic to me. If nothing else, focus on just provisioning is obscuring other critical issues like network connectivity and I/O bandwidth and latency. mgkimsal is spot on with his (sarcastic) comment, you need to think for yourself.