Anyone who actually runs machines can tell you that the cloud is an expensive way to run anything. If you have zero servers, then sure, running something small might be cheaper, but if you have any number more than zero, running things on your own server(s) always make more sense.<p>It's interesting that the people who bought in to the marketing believe that you no longer need systems administrators - now you just need someone who intimately knows AWS and their billing shenanigans, and who will babysit used resources to avoid incurring huge bills.<p>Those marketing fans also say that the cloud is necessary for scaling up, as though they could never imagine running services on owned servers <i>in addition to</i> maintaining services in the cloud that can be turned on and turned up when needed. When people are that blinded by marketing fluff, you know that their cloud expenditure is going to be much higher than it needs to be.<p>I've been helping people move from the cloud to servers they already own for years. The cloud has its place, but anyone who thinks everything belongs there shouldn't be trusted with tech or with spending.