[Duff]

It's not a fad, it's shared services. Sharing comes at the cost of flexibility, which can be a pain in the butt.

Personally, if I'm going to be operating a large computing environment, I'd rather stick 80% of my workload in a cloud environment and pay someone to deal with utilities, buildings, hardware, etc.

The remaining 20% may require a "higher touch" setup at a colo or a facility that I control. The smaller I can make that 20%, the less I need to spend on setting up and maintaining infrastructure.