[abarringer]

High availability? Certainly. Elasticity? Not as well.

The right lesson is "Be a person that strives for excellence in all spheres of life".

I've been doing "Local IT" since '96 and I spun up an EC2 instance the day I saw it announced on slashdot and have been using both ever since. Both excel in some ways in the hands of good people.

Anyone thinking "I'll move to the cloud (or to on-prem) and all my problems will magically go away" is fooling themselves. If you suck at on-prem those underlying issues will carry into the cloud. If you have excellence in a well run on-prem install you'll experience great benefits leveraging the cloud.

For instance, Last month I was discussing a "move to the cloud" with a bank CTO. They had an unreliable on-prem network and moved to the cloud.. and they just discovered after suffering an outage in the cloud what an "availability zone" was. The same attitudes that made their on-prem unreliable, insecure, expensive will make the cloud the same way for them.