[vidarh]

Or you rent managed servers or colo space from one of the many hosting providers that also offers cloud services, and pick and choose. That lets you migrate your base load to colo or managed servers over time, while you still have the nimbleness of being able to scale up and down dynamically if you want or need to.

And my experience from providing devops services to clients on a contract basis is that the clients who use cloud services tends to need more, not less, devops assistance.