To me, a great value-add of the cloud is not having to deal with the hardware setup and not having to wait (sometimes weeks) on large corporate teams to stand up resources when one of my projects require it. Especially during the Dev and QA cycles. The project has the funds and so we can pull in the resources we need and move the project along. Once apps are production ready, well then all the concerns mentioned already come into play. I've seen the cloud services improve dramatically over the last five years. Still a long way to go. Like the billing and figuring out the real cost, ack. Still need more re-invention and innovation in this space. But, I think it is for the better. We'll get there eventually. Don't fight progress! 🙂