The way some people talk about the Cloud it is a Panacea.

a remedy for all ills or difficulties : cure-all

Many people have built marketing initiatives and customers are ready to buy the Cloud believing it is the Panacea for their IT issues.

Myself I have tried to argue that the Cloud has limits, and others will say no they can point to customers who have been successful being in the Cloud.

My latest attempt is to try and discuss the Yin and Yang concept.

In Chinese philosophy, the concept of yin-yang (simplified Chinese: 阴阳; traditional Chinese: 陰陽; pinyin: yīnyáng), which is often called "yin and yang",^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4] is used to describe how opposite or contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world; and, how they give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another. Many natural dualities (such as light and dark, high and low, hot and cold, fire and water, life and death, and so on) are thought of as physical manifestations of the yin-yang concept.

Some may think their data center was the dark days and the solution in AWS is the light.

The Yin and Yang is drawn to show even in the light their is a bit of dark and in the dark is a bit of light.

Even when you look at AWS which is the epitome of Public Cloud it has bits of private in it. The data centers are built or leased by Amazon.com and there are no public disclosures on those data centers. The equipment in the data center is a guarded a secret. The BIOS, Processors, RAM, HD, Network, and Storage Systems are all private.

What is the change management process for APIs? Is it in control of the public or does amazon.com make the decisions on when they will make changes?

The strength of the Public Cloud is following a retail model to address consumer needs. Where IT has gone to dark side is where they think they can dictate to users what their needs are.

If the internal IT group is customer driven and customers have options, then there is not as much a reason to go the Public Cloud.