It's actually often cheaper[1], assuming you need a relatively fixed amount of compute and have the capital for upfront costs. Cloud gives you a lot of flexibility, but at a premium, and trades CAPEX for OPEX which is very appealing if you're a startup and don't know if you'll be around in a year.
Careful with blanket statements like these. Run a system with high sustained compute and data egress; even when accounting for engineer time (and people often neglect to account for time spent administering cloud infra), the cloud markup is huge. While it works for some companies, cloud is not universally cheaper.
This is the sentiment i share, which i think it's important to hammer down the point that it's the fault the cloud providers marketing themselves to be suitable for everyone. Because if they don't get as much money as possible then they don't see a purpose.
For on-prem or cloud, you need some engineers (either SRE or SysEng) to handle your hosting infrastructure. So, not much difference in cost there. Then, there is all of that compute. Currently, an AMD EPYC 7551 system can be put together for about $2.2K USD. That’s 64 threads, 256GB of RAM, redundant 2TB NVMe in RAID1, plus chassis, power and such. The equivalent amount of compute being available 24/7 is going to be extremely pricey over time.
My current employer handles things where internal service at the org are on-prem while customer facing services are cloud. Even the cloud stuff backs up to an on-prem storage system (though it also gets backed up to an off-site S3 provider).
I also held this view for a long time but what you are talking about is basically Amazon EC2. There are, what, 200-250 AWS services, however, and that's where things begin to become more interesting. Can you replace any of them with in house solutions? Certainly. But the costs of doing so might not be favorable.
You could operate an on premise bakery but most companies just order donuts.
True, but even a single server is a lot cheaper on Linode, and cheaper still on OVH, even the best quality colo and dedicated server providers, than on any cloud. On-prem is going to be cheaper than that. And internet connectivity ... is more expensive than it was in 1990, and generally pretty much free in colo or dedi services.
Most software vendors switched to subscription model, so that’s not obvious anymore. Yeah and as you mention, good luck getting experts for all of your software and hardware components unless you are a big tech company.
And not guaranteed to solve problems like this. Because at the end of the day, the maintenance of a cloud infrastructure is irreducible complexity so you replace having a breach because a centralized controlling authority made a mistake with having a breach because your own hired staff made a mistake and you got infiltrated by either a lucky drive by or a persistent attacker against your organization.
It's not exactly a replacement. Your own hired staff can still mess things up in the cloud and leave a door open. The cloud doesn't magically apply all the best practices on its own. See all the people caught with open access to S3.
