[CogitoCogito]

> How fast can you spin up a dozen VMs? A message bus? A scalable database with read replicas? An entire redundant data center in another region? A few terabytes of storage? A redis cluster? An ElasticSearch cluster? A CDN? A few load balancers? The procurement process to get an extra server provision in a colo will by definition be slower than my deploying a CloudFormation stack.

Your examples here are just examples of situations where you basically need a cloud solution by definition. If these are your requirements, then yes obviously you should use cloud for it. That said, your points are a bit confusing. It's not an either-or. For situations like you're describing, you use cloud. For situations where you don't need to use cloud, you can consider something else like on-prem or colo or ...

You seem to have a (literally) extremist position where it's all cloud or nothing. It's not.

[scarface_74]

> For situations where you don't need to use cloud, you can consider something else like on-prem or colo or ...

I literally just gave examples where a colo or on prem makes complete sense - anytime that managing infrastructure is a competitive advantage.

If you have a static workload and your company has the competencies to manage infrastructure, go for on prem.

I’m the last person to recommend someone move to any cloud provider just to treat it like a colo.

[CogitoCogito]

Well then I'm a little confused. You wrote this earlier which contradicted my post:

> Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.

You don't need to be a company "where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise" in order for managing your own infrastructure to be a competitive advantage. Managing (some of) your own infrastructure can be a competitive advantage even managing infrastructure is not your core competency or even your goal. It is a competitive advantage of the TOC is lower. It sometimes is.

But if you're now saying you agree with my statement, then I guess well we're in agreement.