I've previously worked for a place that ran most of their production network "on-prem". They had a few thousand physical machines spread across 6 or so colocation sites on three continents. I enjoyed that job immensely; I'd jump at the chance to build something like it from the ground up. I'm not sure if that actually makes sense for very many businesses though.

I'm getting that opportunity, however I expect it will be the last as most have migrated to the cloud and smaller companies are appealing to me; smallest company (of 5) I've worked for had 4.4k employees and large companies have the resources to roll their own.

Unless there is an onprem movement I expect cloud to be the future as maintaining the tech stack onprem is difficult and we need to nake decisions down to the hardware we order.