At some level of scale, it makes sense to hire your own platform team and do it all in house. At the other end, it also works for turtle mode / lifestyle / small businesses.

The place for expensive cloud is when you're growing fast and need to spin up infra in a hurry. When you can't be bothered to configure software outside of your core competency.

First off, the Cloud isn't expensive. Cloud misuse and bad architecture is expensive. It's a lack of skill (and to some degree tooling as well) that cause this to happen, expensive is not some inherent property of the cloud. Also, unless you are in some sort of business that has suddenly found itself without the need to innovate, or you are building a very commoditized thing, there is no reason to ever go in house.

Second, the reason people go cloud is not because they can't be bothered to configure things. It's because they have realized that any time spent doing undifferentiated work like that is a complete and utter waste of time and capital.

Third, the clouds power (and ultimately why it's less expensive) is not its ability to spin up infra in a hurry, the clouds power is elasticity. Properly architected cloud applications spin resources down as freely as they spin up, without intervention. You don't pay for idle and you certainly don't have to pay an army of people to maintain things that are now completely automated and realized in code or at the very least managed (without you having to think about it) for you.

Going multi-cloud, and forcing yourself to use the lowest common denominator services that are common across cloud providers is a really great way to miss out on all of those things.

So has Netflix, Disney+, Intuit, Capital One not reached that scale?

Netflix has quite a bit of their own hardware at the edge [1].

Disney literally just started and are rapidly growing.

I don't know anything about Intuit or Capital One. Do they make you wear a suit and tie while working on Oracle databases? (I kid.)

[1] https://www.theverge.com/22787426/netflix-cdn-open-connect

Netflix has their CDNs at the edge. Their core infrastructure is on AWS, Disney+ technologically is an outgrowth of the BamTech acquisition which has one of the best regarded streaming technologies.

You wouldn't consider a CDN core infrastructure for a streaming service?

Considering that the hardware that Netflix is using for a CDN is physically located in the network providers network center, they can’t very well use AWS for that.

For 5G networks they can (Wavelength) and maybe do.

At a previous gig, they were moving from on-prem to cloud for accounting purposes.

It is not a binary choice between AWS/GCP/Azure and running your own data center.

In the context of this article, and I presume the parent comment, “bare metal” refers to a hosted VM (like ec2 instances) not running your own data center.

Bare metal definitionally means not a VM.