[icedchai]

I won't argue that running your own infrastructure is a better deal for many types of applications, especially if you can plan everything out, forecast usage, etc. There is absolutely a lot of waste in cloud spending. I've found tons of it myself. Cloud "cost optimization" is definitely a good business.

What "cloud" really buys you is flexibility. I also don't really miss the days of buying my own servers, lugging them into a data center, waiting for drops to be provisioned, going there late at night when there's a failure, or talking remote hands through stuff.