One honest question for all people who miss the "good old days" of on-prem: have you ever worked in a shop that ran their own private datacenter? because I did

One honest question for all people who miss the "good old days" of on-prem: have you ever worked in a shop that ran their own private datacenter? because I did and it wasn't lovely. My first job ran their own datacenter. We started with a rack of about 50 nodes and some odd computers here and there. By the time I left we had a rack of 250 nodes and we had thrown away all individual servers (oh Solaris I won't miss you). > Truly, why not try to run your own private cloud? How many old laptops, desktops, PIs, etc must we all have lying around? Although VMs and Containers have done a world of difference on running your own datacenter, there are still reasons why just use the hardware that you have lying around for a business is a bad idea. First, random laptops and desktops don't have a good ratio of price, performance, and energy consumption. Second, despite virtualization, all this heterogeneity in hardware and software is bound to cause an ongoing maintenance headache. Third, I hope your business doesn't have a sudden spike of demand, or you'll be struggling to find hardware to support it. Fourth, say good bye to quick iteration and experimentation when you have huge lead times and tons of capex. Bottom line, cool for a hobbyist project, not cool for starting a business (and a maybe for a well establish and mature business).