[sangnoir]

> Without a cloud you’re always running up against limits, out of power, out out cooling, out of rack space, out of hardware.

I bet most customers of cloud services are not in a high-growth phase, so this is scenario most organizations aspire to ("What if we suddenly got popular?" is a fantasy that's hard to disabuse someone of internally, if you want to be known as a team player

> Management spends a lot of time and energy managing the datacenter budget. With cloud you get what you want without asking too much...

I fully agree, this is the core reason why most companies gravitate towards cloud: management abdicates control of costs to engineers, resulting in less friction - but its OpEx, not CapEx, so the bean counters are chilled about it. If the same low-friction approach were applied to DC equipment, you'd get similar results, but cheaper.