I'm going against the grain here, I've worked with two enterprise companies that use cloud based systems for the deployment of their robots and code base. It worked really well albeit the system loaded a little slower than when you have BP installed in your own network but it was still fast and easy to work with.
Cloud system was AWS and the system had incredibly good reliability. We could scale out VDI's in an afternoon or less. E.g. if we wanted another 50 instances we just emailed and within few hours we had the space allocation to set up. Cost was very reasonable, think the cost worked out at about 1/8th the cost of physical machines but the speed at which things happened and the security of having them virtualised made a big difference. No security concerns of someone unplugging a machine or looking at a screen to glean information. Also it meant the Control Room team had their own dedicated way of handling machines and not having to deal with people having unwarranted access to machines that can cause conflicts sometimes.
Overall my experience with cloud based setup has been wholly positive and whenever I go back to using normal machines to run Blueprism I dislike it. It's a big hassle trying to acquire machines, or trying to sort out which machines need to run with what profiles or keeping a log of who has accessed what machine. The clients who had enterprise setup were also happy with it after both moved from physical machine set up to virtual machine set up.
here's the TL;DR
difficulty in setting up 8/10 (there are quite a few hurdles to jump in setting up)
once set up ease of use 10/10 (super easy to use, no big learning curve for new comers)
reliability 9.5/10 (went down once for a day but cloud support were all over it, hourly updates on where they were on fixing the issue and otherwise speed and up time were top notch)
dev speed 6/10 (its not 'slow' but it's slower than having local DB that BP is setup on)
overall effectiveness/happiness 9/10 (absolutely recommend to anyone. physical machines are easy enough to set up when you don't have to procure them and cloud systems have a slight setup hurdle but the ability to scale out on a cloud level is unbeatable and security was never a concern for either team, well it was a concern but the CTO was happy with how it was implemented that security wasn't an issue/roadblock to setting it up)
