>"Spotify was a stand-out, almost no large tech company bought into cloud like they did, and everyone said the same thing: "It's not our core competence, it would require more people".

I'm not sure what you mean by this as Spotify was actually quite late buying into cloud. They ran on bare metal through at least 2015. From their engineering blog:

">Thus, in early 2015 we started exploring what a cloud strategy would look like for Spotify."[1]

So they would have been running on bare metal through some of the biggest spikes in growth i.e launching in the US market. I don't think they bought in any more or any less than anyone else who transitioned from bare metal to cloud and for probably the same reasons.

[1] https://engineering.atspotify.com/2019/12/views-from-the-clo...