> this makes no sense: can individual companies operate computing infrastructure more efficiently than cloud providers? As long as you know your predicted grow

> this makes no sense: can individual companies operate computing infrastructure more efficiently than cloud providers? As long as you know your predicted growth yes. Cloud providers are operating "efficiently" because they do oversubscription on a lot of services. You don't really think that those 8 vCPUs are dedicated to your VM only, do you? Also, the thing with cloud are the managed services that make it easy for developers to process/exchange data, like Amazon SQS or cloud functions and things like this. Like the first comment says, if you know what you are doing, it is quite easy actually to host your infrastructure on-prem.