> You're telling me it's important to people to "own" instead of "rent." Well I can manufacture an "Own" out of a "Rent": I write up a contract for my customer that says "$1,000,000 for 100 EPYC servers", I ship an empty steel box, the end user gets an AWS account which they cannot add anything to, and it has 100 EPYC server metal instances in it. I pay the bills in that account. Okay? Now I have created "owning" out of renting.

No, you haven’t. You didn’t deliver what was paid for. This wouldn’t be accepted.

> Do you see?

I’m sorry, but I do not. You’re not describing a business. You’re throwing some numbers out to describe a fraudulent enterprise.

> what is really the material difference between cloud and on-premises compute, when the interfaces between the two look so similar?

The material differences are around capex vs open spending, that you can locate your own hardware where you want to (which matters for things like “must be in a colo in southern Manhattan” (or any of the other reasons why physical location matters for latency reasons) or “must not leave the soil of $COUNTRY”), and the entirety of “TCO of owning is cheaper than renting for many workloads.” That’s just some of the larger obvious ones.

Okay well my feedback to you is, maybe have a chatbot read what I am saying to you, and ask for a charitable interpretation, which is the site’s rules. It’s simply a “looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck” argument. It’s not complicated. The way I am looking at things is how a lot of execs at giant companies and VCs look at things, you are welcome to ask them too, or ask for that frame of reference from a chatbot. You guys just raised $100m, you should be able to engage over questions of arb or whatever, and just know this stuff, and be able to talk to bankers and talk like a banker.

The stubbornness around interpreting this argument as negatively and as flawed as possible is a bad look.