Why was hybrid not considered? With providers like megaport providing really inexpensive direct connect, this is almost a no brainer.
This may seem harsh, but relying on random commenters shows a huge flaw in how you guys went about this.
Physical environments DO work well, but they do require experience to run them. I have used AWS for as long as its been around, but nothing beats physical environments for "known workloads", as long as you run them EXACTLY like you would run a cloud environment. This is why the hybrid approach is such a great thing. Run what you know well in physical and reap great savings, run what you dont know well cloud ( as well as take advantage of the analytics products), and reap the speed ;)
- This means thinking of physical servers are individual units.
- This means redundancy at every level.
- This means architecting for failure ( servers and switches do gie ).
- This means no shared storage for performance critical parts ( shared storage as below the OS level ).
- This means objects stores/sharding/etc as your storage layer.
- This means real engineering
- And this means exactly the same whether you're physical or not.
I've managed environments of 50 vm's and environments of 50000 physical servers. The methodology is always the same.
and yes, this means you can save some monthly cost, and apply it to staff, that can do a lot more than just maintain this infrastructure.
PS: for those that think that showing up to a datacenter is required, you're doing it wrong. Pretty much any datacenter has hot-hands service, and with the right redundancy, hardware replacement is something you can do at a slower pace.
PPS: im sure someone will nitpick some of my points. The reality is, there is real money savings here. For example, Snapchat spends MORE in cloud infrastructure in 2016/2017 per year, than ALL OF GOOGLE did in 2012... think about that for a second... even netflix runs openconnect to push bits..