People love to generalize this stuff and I still work with hardware all the time (gasp!)
What it really comes down to is this - you cannot just make a blanket assumption on Cloud vs Self Hosted
Generally however I believe that the hybrid approach is going to be the best for most larger companies - any highly variable workload (that benefits massively from autoscaling in the cloud) is going to be better renting servers from AWS or similar. And any very predictable workload (especially ones that require lots of compute or GPU power) will be cheaper to run on your own (think something like a GPO farm for a 3D animation studio).
And of course there is nothing stoping you from doing both and having your very predicatble and high power workloads in your own DC with your own managed hardware and then just autoscale as needed to whatever Cloud you want.
This shit always comes full circle - we had Mainframes and Terminals (basically a mini cloud) and the pendulum swung for awhile to personal PC's and now we are penduluming back again. Theres no all encompassing solution for everyone.
What it really comes down to is this - you cannot just make a blanket assumption on Cloud vs Self Hosted
Generally however I believe that the hybrid approach is going to be the best for most larger companies - any highly variable workload (that benefits massively from autoscaling in the cloud) is going to be better renting servers from AWS or similar. And any very predictable workload (especially ones that require lots of compute or GPU power) will be cheaper to run on your own (think something like a GPO farm for a 3D animation studio).
And of course there is nothing stoping you from doing both and having your very predicatble and high power workloads in your own DC with your own managed hardware and then just autoscale as needed to whatever Cloud you want.
This shit always comes full circle - we had Mainframes and Terminals (basically a mini cloud) and the pendulum swung for awhile to personal PC's and now we are penduluming back again. Theres no all encompassing solution for everyone.