I don't think putting the hardware into the rack is really the sticking point; what people like about the cloud is that it abstracts all kinds of details away f

I don't think putting the hardware into the rack is really the sticking point; what people like about the cloud is that it abstracts all kinds of details away for them and provides a cohesive system to manage it. AWS, Azure and Google are actually selling something like what you are talking about now [1], where for whatever legal/legacy/performance reason you need it on-prem but still want to pay AWS 5x the cost just to give you the same management interface, and they have some kind of pod they slap into your data-center. What does it tell you that there is a market for this, where essentially what you are buying from them is a management and control plane, when other companies like BMC have been selling that as a standalone product for decades (and for the most part failing to live up to their customer's actual expectations)? [1] https://www.bizety.com/2020/06/28/aws-outposts-google-anthos-gke-and-azure-on-prem-overview/ https://www.bizety.com/2020/06/28/aws-outposts-google-anthos... edit: I actually think a big pull of the cloud is also about shutting down archaic internal IT organizations that have been slowing people down so that it takes weeks and weeks to launch a simple new webservice. Better to give your programmers a cloud account and let them get shit done.