For sure. I was at a company in the mid 2000s and we had 50+ racks of servers and managing those back in the day was a very big lift. If we had the tooling we d

For sure. I was at a company in the mid 2000s and we had 50+ racks of servers and managing those back in the day was a very big lift. If we had the tooling we do now back then, we could have done it with a fraction of the cost. When I told some of my old coworkers I was going to get my own rack two years ago, there were some comments that I am a glutton for pain and suffering. Overall, it's been a great experience and cost savings on my end. I couldn't afford to run my workloads on any cloud provider. I also understand that I have a skill set that enables me to take advantage of running my own hardware, but with the advancements in tooling and cheaper hardware costs I believe the folks that don't have these skills have a better chance of doing the same. I am hopeful that datacenter providers will shift their business models in the future to enable easier access to getting space, power and bandwidth. That would help enable smaller teams to run their own hardware. The network/bandwidth part has gotten better. Almost all of the major datacenter providers offer some sort of software defined network service so you can get cheaper bandwidth and IP space than from the cloud providers. It is still more expensive in the long run than getting a bandwidth provider yourself. IPv4 space is still expensive but you can lease blocks pretty easily too.