Fun thought exercise, thanks! My question is, what advantage would a large exchange find in moving to cloud? They’ve already got the personnel capable of managing their environment. They’re not a rapidly-growing startup in need of flexibility. They’re large enough to get at least decent deals purchasing gear. “The cloud” will naturally expect to make a profit on the deal, which likely eats up (and then some) any savings which might otherwise be delivered.
I “get” cloud in a lot of circumstances but it doesn’t seem to make much sense here.
That's essentially what you're buying from a cloud provider. Most of the time its not so much renting the hardware as renting their labor in maintenance.
That is assuming your hardware needs don't have a wide enough variance from time to time (scale up/scale down)
I “get” cloud in a lot of circumstances but it doesn’t seem to make much sense here.