> All vendors do this - you can't escape it. This is why companies began leaving for the Cloud - sure it's upfront more expensive, but the negotiations are not as protracted.

I don't get your point here: if you mean the public cloud, it's the synonym of vendor lock-in now.

Everything is vendor lock-in. The difference is negotiations are not as protracted, the muscle to develop a multi-cloud strategy is fairly well built in our industry, AND cloud purchasing offers multiple different styles of billing (eg. subscription driven, multiyear, credit driven, etc) whereas with on-prem you have only a single type of billing model.

Sorry just to clarify, leave for the cloud or leave cloud? Looks like in this case it is indeed leave for the cloud (leave VMs) but I also heard a lot about leaving cloud for self hosting.

Leaving/left for the cloud. There is some scaling down of cloud resources for self hosting, but as a whole all CSPs have seen growth in users across all buckets.

On-prem doesn't give you flexibility, and leaves you open to getting arm twisted by vendors. Similar stuff happens in cloud ofc, but it's easier to implement a multi-cloud strategy than a multi-hypervisor strategy.

Gotcha, thanks for the insight.