We came to the same conclusion. We do hosing for commercial HVAC systems and due to software requirements and the human factor of training the VM's we had in a

We came to the same conclusion. We do hosing for commercial HVAC systems and due to software requirements and the human factor of training the VM's we had in azure cost us significantly more than on premises servers. Add to that we generally keep those servers a little longer than some others would just increases the savings. This is still true even though we pay a colocation to host those servers. The cloud flexibility is completely irrelevant for us in light of multi year service contracts from each customer we work with.