It's so easy to sit back on your mega yacht and dismiss cloud as something that's always been around and always will be and blah blah blah, but for a little startup it's MANA FROM HEAVEN.
To be able to do massively compute intensive or storage intensive tasks on demand without sinking a million dollars of capital into a datacenter is the difference between success and failure for my little startup.
How many times have you heard "oh, there's a ten week lead time on that server" or "there's no more power in the cage" or "there are no more cages at the datacenter" or "i'll be up all night recovering the raid array" or any number of other hidden costs in owning or trying to own hardware?
We check our cost projections for buy vs cloud almost every week, and when the time comes we'll definitely buy, but for we couldn't be doing what we're doing without it. Sure it's overhyped, but so was the fucking web. Yes, there's weird performance stuff and not always enough boxes, but so what? Sorry if I'm missing a subtler message he had, but i had to turn off the video after about 30s because it hurt my brain.