> Cloud is an expensive, overly complicated, lock-in boondoggle. Only if you go with companies that make it such. Renting web hosting on someone's collection

> Cloud is an expensive, overly complicated, lock-in boondoggle. Only if you go with companies that make it such. Renting web hosting on someone's collection of rack-mounted systems running some well-known OS is Cloud, and there's nothing inherently bad about that, unless you've defined Cloud to mean "Only The Bad Stuff About Using Computers Other People Own". You can run things like they were run in the 1990s, complete with Apache and mod_perl CGI and MariaDB swapped in for MySQL and everything held together with shell scripts and run via ssh and ftp. No magic, no lock-in, no complexity beyond what every other serious general-purpose computer system is these days. I agree that Big Cloud Providers layer on pricing models and whatever middle-management-ware they can come up with to obfuscate the underlying mechanics, but if you're against that, say so. Don't catch everything in your blast radius because it reduces the overall impact.