Marketing can only go so far. Are more people finally starting to take their heads out of the cloud? Not only do cloud providers need to pay their own costs, they also need to make a profit on top of that; thus, if one thinks critically, the only time renting can be cheaper than owning is if it's short-term.
Their costs plus their profits is still cheaper than hiring your own people to rebuild what they've already done, except taking much longer and usually ending up with worse service. Unless you're an infrastructure or network logistics company, it's a waste of resources to build your own. Cloud services are so commoditized already it's unlikely to be any sort of meaningful differentiator for your company. Especially i…
Plenty of mid sized data centres make sense too. Something I see in common with many of these businesses is either the requirement to store a lot of stateful data or to have data locality and to not be concerned with things like being able to serve international customers or being a plodding business which will predict at a steady predictable rate. Some people run businesses that run headfirst into cloud companies entire pricing strategy because their business doesn’t work like a VC funded tech startup.
The “but somebody can figure all this stuff out for you” cuts both ways. Why can’t a skilled company make it easier to staff and operate an on premise data centre? Running a datacenter only gets less labour intensive for what you get every year. You know that you can hire people for pretty much any aspect of building or maintaining a datacenter that you can imagine? The datacenter is commodified so why is it special that the cloud is?
I just feel this analysis is a spurious oversimplification and what you’re far more likely to see is a sort of Pareto distribution of datacenters and the cloud is never going to swallow the whole market.