I work for a cloud provider and I'll tell you, one of the reasons for the cloud premium is that it is a total pain in the ass to run hardware. Last week I installed two servers and between them had four mysterious problems that had to be solved by reseating cards, messing with BIOS settings, etc. Last year we had to deal with a 7 site, 5 country RMA for 150 100gb copper cables with incorrect coding in their EEPROMs.
I tell my colleagues: it's a good thing that hardware sucks: the harder it is to run bare metal, the happier our customers are that they choose the cloud. :)
(But also: this is an excellent article, full of excellent facts. Luckily, my customers choose differently.)
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