I'm convinced hybrid cloud is the way to go. Anything needing high IO performance should be on dedicated. Anything needed CPU/memory elasticity (worker nodes, etc) should be in the cloud. Assuming you can get low latency connectivity into AWS with DirectConnect, this might work?
The speed of light is not your friend. You can never compete with the latency of a local network versus even the fastest connection to a cloud provider.
Yeah, that (worker nodes, async processing, etc) seems like one of those ideal use-case for clouds that I could definitely support as a viable option for companies that aren't ready for all-in cloud deployment.
