A long, long time ago when public cloud IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) was still relatively new I was doing some contract work for a big international company. One of the tasks for the department was an IaaS proof of concept: does offloading servers to the public cloud result in cost savings? Long story short: the PoC was halted after several months because the AWS IaaS offering was prohibitively expensive and inflexible. We had enough systems and data to keep a team of qualified engineers busy and to get good purchasing discounts. An additional problem was the very rigid service catalog: there weren’t that many flavors of machines available back then and custom machines were either not possible or even more expensive.
Fast forward to 2016 and I’m looking into public/private/on-premises IaaS again for a different company. Prices have dropped, but there are still some things to keep in mind when considering a move to the public cloud IaaS models.