Cloud is really good at what it does. There are definitely some business models it simply cannot accommodate, but I think these are in the minority now. I used

Cloud is really good at what it does. There are definitely some business models it simply cannot accommodate, but I think these are in the minority now. I used to be super-against cloud until I became the backstop for our entire IT infrastructure. It's really funny what happens to your beliefs when you take on ownership of more problems. Complaining about how Azure is 20ms slower than it needs to be on some storage service is nice, but are you prepared to personally take total ownership for that service's health by bringing it on-prem? Talking about how we could do it cheaper & faster in our house is super easy. Actually executing is a completely different story. I won't even move back to on-prem Active Directory at this point. The convenience of having this managed centrally is unbelievable compared to where we were at a decade ago. Today, an employee can go to Best Buy, grab a completely new machine, connect it to our directory using the retail OOBE and start working productively within 20 minutes. Not one time does the employee need to bother an IT person during this process. Could you achieve the same with an on-prem setup? Absolutely. Would it take more money and time than we have available? Probably. There are risks with going all-in on cloud, but I assert that those risks are almost always less severe than the risks endured with on-prem. When is the last time a cloud vendor made some last-minute change to a product or service that endangered their customer base? You typically have years to migrate off something a cloud vendor doesn't want to support anymore, simply because they have to make sure 10k other customers don't balk too. This is also why these products are so stable in terms of roadmap. Going with the herd is a proven way to protect yourself. Being the one shop still online when 99% of the clouds go down is probably not a realistic competitive advantage for your business. I would conclude by saying that you should minimize the diversity of cloud products as much as is reasonable for your operations. Keeping AWS to just EC2, EBS, Route53, etc., ensures that any need to migrate to a different cloud provider is actually tenable. Put the intelligence into your application/product, not the plumbing around it.