drew, i like your general analysis of the situation. but i see private cloud as unnecessarily complex and expensive, especially if you say openstack. a sailboat is a hole in the water in which you throw money; openstack is a hole in your organization in which you throw engineers, and expensive ones. from 10,000m, i see two general cloud strategies provide a highly scalable front deployment for services which are actually based in-house. this can be done with MAAS so as not to be locked in to a cloud vendor's shiny toys. and yes, k8s is a common pattern here; though maybe a bit much for the ncc's seemingly rather simple (from the outside:) use cases. move totally to a single cloud provider taking advantage of the great tools and features they provide to make development and scaling easy. of course, as there are no standards in this space, you are locked in to the cloud provider. and, as has been pointed out, likely a non- emea one. i believe the discussion is moving from the latter to the former. at least i hope so. also, it might help how we think about it if we framed it in terms of the technical attributes we want, scale, resilience, performance, ... as opposed to moving to the cloud. and maybe i see it as more 'extending' rather than 'moving'. visions of slimy pseudopods :) randy