The fact that Amazon offers Direct Connect shows that on-premises platform growth are certainly numbered but not the mere existence of them. Plenty of companies

The fact that Amazon offers Direct Connect shows that on-premises platform growth are certainly numbered but not the mere existence of them. Plenty of companies are still forcibly keeping their data in their own datacenters due to regulatory reasons despite desperately wanting to use third party providers. So until these regulations change (I'd bet it'll happen for PCI-DSS level 2+ before several federal ones unless FedRAMP supersedes them all) the largest possible users for AWS (and sadly, the most likely to benefit from it the most) are likely to be stuck operating stupidly expensive datacenters for pretty much no good reason besides making last-generation tech jobs.