This entire article is flawed. The true value add of cloud services (AWS, etc) is that you no longer have to pay for disk jockeys to run a data center. To play games with refreshing hundreds or thousands of pieces of bare metal every 3-4 years [EDIT] is to doom your company to crushing O&M.
If you've never done Datacenter operations, then you're missing a giant point that eliminating an entire department of expensive technical people is a huge gain long term.