Realistically, where you host is a business decision because it has costs. If you want to couple to a cloud provider, etc is also a busines decision. The CTO's

Realistically, where you host is a business decision because it has costs. If you want to couple to a cloud provider, etc is also a busines decision. The CTO's job is to provide you with an expert opinion. He has to convince you not the other way around. In this thread, we have a lot of technical people who would want this to be a technical decision. But it is not. It's a business decision and has long term consquences often lasting longer than the technical staff who made them. The reason cloud providers give credits is for vendor lock-in. It's an entirely apporirate decision to want to avoid vendor lock-in and when people are selling technical products to companies they sell the business value first and the technical value second. The business decision here is do you want to spend time and money just now on moving or do you want to spend time and money later on. If you want to avoid vendor lock-in go for a cheaper hardware solution then you need to spend time and salary money on setting it up. If you want to stay with Azure then from what I've read in this thread from what you've said you're going to have to spend money later on for resources and you're going to have to spend time and money later on managing the costs. This seems literally like technical debt. While it may be frustrating to technical people that a business person is making a decision that effects how they work this happens in every other industry. Business people decide the vendors, they decide the materials, etc all based on business reasons.