As in every business decision, you must weigh whether CapEx or OpEx is a better option. Whether that is compute space, offices, vehicles, or almost anything els

As in every business decision, you must weigh whether CapEx or OpEx is a better option. Whether that is compute space, offices, vehicles, or almost anything else. For startups? Cloud is really interesting because you get cheap compute without any capital investment, and you might get credits from your provider (e.g. AWS Activate), as well as unlimited scale-up if you experience high growth in a short time frame. For established companies with an almost-fixed usage, going CapEx (renting DC space and buying your own hardware) is a no-brainer, assuming you can afford the upfront expense and know (or have enough reasons to believe) that you'll be around for 3-5 years to justify the expense. --- The important thing is to escape flashy provider-specific services that may lock you in long term. For example, serverless functions (like AWS Lambda or Azure Functions), authentication systems like Cognito or Auth0; or database systems like DynamoDB. Because then, you're locked in unless you want to go through the pain of reimplementing every serverless function into your own "serverful" (is that a term?) code, or migrating every single user out of Cognito, or migrate GBs (or TBs) of data into your own database system.