Ended up doing a small on-prem solution. VMWare for 6 CPUs x 32 cores = 192 cores runs about $3K/year for the software side which is a good deal to get started. That leaves about $240K/year or so to cover other costs. Not a slam dunk necessarily, but the on-prem store with vmware is not unreasonable.

If it's greenfield I'd agree. There's a reason why most companies founded after 2008 have a heavy public cloud presence.

The issue is if you are a large brownfield deployment (like most F1000s), a "Cloud Transformation" takes forever and is costly.

It can be done - for example Capital One and Broadcom - but it requires executive buy-in to respect engineering leadership and build a solid DevOps/Platform team.

I know if I was to found my own company tomorrow, I'd be entire cloud first because of velocity and ease of scalability, but you can't expect a company like UnitedHealth Group to transition to an entirely cloud first environment within a 2-3 year timeframe as even a minor outage represents millions of dollars lost a minute and litigation.

Over the next 10-15 years we'll see a large number of non-tech first companies becoming multi-cloud, but in 2023, it's still work in progress.