At least from my perspective as an engineer, AWS in particular removes huge layers of nonsense, and there are no increased layers of communication. It's cheape

At least from my perspective as an engineer, AWS in particular removes huge layers of nonsense, and there are no increased layers of communication. It's cheaper than buying machines (by a huge amount!), cheaper than keeping them running, and I can make changes on the fly that would otherwise take a week to grind through netops. If load spikes (as it did recently for one of our customers), the conventional answer is "we can't buy 20 more servers in 2 days"! My response was "why not use EC2?" For a new project, rather than submitting a PO for $20k+ in hardware, I can say "it'll cost $140 for the first month". Much easier to approve -- I can put that through on expenses! Finally, if you consider that most large companies outsource datacenter management, whether truly outsourced to a services company, or "internally outsourced" to another division, using a cloud system that at least acknowledges your right to remotely administer your own service is a step forward, not a step back.