At megacorp scales, you're wasting money going to the cloud unless your load profile is highly variable. GCP/AWS profit margins are very high versus bare metal, and if you're megacorp scale you can afford ops and bare metal you can depreciate over several years.

(and before you trot out Netflix, the vast majority of their bits are served out of OpenConnect appliances colocated at eyeball ISPs and peering points)

I recently watched a Mega Corp fire the entire IT Ops department and hire a handful cloud consultants to move all of their current vSphere (thousands of VMs) infrastructure to Azure.

The rationalization was that in the long run it was cheaper to maintain the status quo, and not have to worry about networking, firewall, and replication issues by hand. I'm pretty sure MS also gave them a large discount at that scale.

I don't doubt it. The winds change often, sometimes quickly. People going to move to the cloud, people going to move back to on-prem, as sure as the sun is going to rise.

My hunch is you'll see a lot of move back on-prem during the next downturn when hardware providers need to move a lot of hardware under duress while businesses look at cutting their opex (you have to pay for cloud compute/storage forever, whereas you can run on paid gear for the cost of power, network, cooling, space, and the tech people you need anyway).

To quote Warren Buffet, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out."

"and if you're megacorp scale you can afford ops and bare metal you can depreciate over several years."

Don't assume this.

I worked at a 'big tech company' that made a very popular device.

Our IT was a disaster.

We made one of the world's most popular gadgety things - we couldn't make our email work.

Doing things the right way is extremely expensive sometimes, you have to pay zillions for consultants and they can screw it up.

If 'IT' is not a massive cost - often - the consideration is moot - move it to the cloud where things will work, and there is low overhead.

I'll bet $100 that Amazon is earning those margins easily.

Another example: why do companies use Windows instead of Linux which is free? Well, because Linux in a regular corp environment would be a huge nightmare. $50/employee to get something that works? That's dog-food heap. It's hardly a consideration, easy, just buy it. Maybe MS margins are huge. Who cares, because the value they created is monster.

Sometimes 'point and click' IT is worth a lot given all the risk factors etc. etc..

Most big orgs are dysfunctional. Moving to the cloud doesn’t fix company culture.

Yes, but it can take a bunch of paint points away.

If you think about it- why on earth did companies start having massive servers in the first place?

That was an anomoly.