Not to mention scaling. Most clients I know never, ever have scaled once. Ever. Or if they do, it's to save money.

One server means you can handle the equiv of 100+ AWS instances. And if you're into that turf, then having a rack of servers saves even more.

Big corp is pulling back from the cloud for a reason.

I mentioned this in an earlier comment. It is dumb to be on the cloud at a large enough scale.