I briefly did devops with Softlayer in 2011 (dedicated hosting) and now I do devops in Azure. To be quite frank: Both hosted and cloud have a learning curve. T

I briefly did devops with Softlayer in 2011 (dedicated hosting) and now I do devops in Azure. To be quite frank: Both hosted and cloud have a learning curve. The difficulty is about the same. Furthermore, many businesses shoot themselves in the foot worrying about scalability too early. Are you really going to jump up to Google scale overnight? (No one does. Chances are your software has bugs that will prevent this, even if you are running "in the cloud.") When your business is well-run, your scalability needs will be predictable enough that you can provision hardware in advance. That being said: I really like Azure. If you want to "save money for the company," focus on making sure that your software is reasonably efficient. This way you can pay for 10 servers instead of 100 servers.