> The problem is that if your business is dependent on the cloud, that's not actually your choice: The providers can, and will, change the prices whenever they

> The problem is that if your business is dependent on the cloud, that's not actually your choice: The providers can, and will, change the prices whenever they want People often say this, but it's just not true. First, any company with significant spend has custom deals with custom pricing in exchange for a commit. Second, even if you don't have that, there's often reserved/"savings plans"/whatever where you commit in exchange for a lower price. Third, the only time any of the big 3 cloud providers has increased pricing (it usually only goes down) is when GCP increased bandwidth and storage costs a few months ago. AWS, which is what the majority of the market uses, has only decreased prices, hundreds of times. Regarding VMware, you know you have to pay for licenses and support in an ongoing manner and they are known to jack up prices, right? Furthermore, VMware's software is a dumpster fire that gets you around 5% of what you get from a serious public cloud. Maybe 30%-50% if you go in with NSX and vSAN and the vSuite where you lock in yourself to terrible software with the wrong abstractions, lack of APIs, at enormous inflexible costs. How is that any better?