hopefully with your spare 3437 dollars a month you could figure out how to ever maintain such a thing.
It really, really depends on on your use case, but there are some scenarios where bare metal just makes more sense. Also there are ones where cloud makes everything much easier.
North America-oriented B2B app that's a JavaScript SPA witch connects to some lightweight services fronting a database? I think that's a great contender for the cloud.
500-node Hadoop cluster running 24/7 with heavy load? You are going to see some huge savings by maintaining a Datacenter. You can use the extra 1.7MM/mo. to set up some robust networking equipment and have few people on-site.
Like every IT trend, "Cloud ops" is the trendy mind-slug that eats everyone's brain and makes them say that everyone who doesn't jump on the bandwagon is going to die broke and unloved in the gutter.
Remember how XML meant massively reduced integration costs and firing all your developers because GUI tools would let business managers connect pretty boxes and then kick back to watch the graphs go up and to the right as business exploded?
Yeah, so AWS is great, if you're building something that works well on AWS. And that's a large class of apps - if you're throwing up a Drupal front end to a CRUD line-of-business backend, need to push notifications and send some email, sure. You're dead in the middle of their target market.
Doing something interesting? Doesn't even have to be as massive as the parent suggests - if you're doing something that blows any of the billable parameters out of the sweet-spot, like bandwidth, storage, latency requirements, things that depend on system-locality, etc., you're much better off building, and using AWS for the pieces which can be broken off that don't hit the pain points.
Yeah, at the larger sizes it might make sense, but not for everyone.
I worked for a MSP for many years, and was well acquainted with our regional competitors. Our uptime and theirs was nowhere near AWS-level.
You're getting a different engineer every time you pick up the phone. They most certainly do not know your systems like an internal team would. I regularly saw cascading/circular issues caused by lack of familiarity and/or poor change management.
Owning and administering your own iron makes sense at a certain scale, but it's a much bigger scale than most companies will reach.
What do you do when they're on vacation/sick/sleeping?
Thing is, I really want us to host our own stuff. For one thing if you don't host anything you lose all competence and then you really are beholden to your cloud provider.
But it seems to be that we are in this situation until someone figures out how to comodify servers - and server orchestration - to the point where this stuff gets cheaper to manage again.
This pendulum always swings. No sooner will we control our own hardware again than someone will come up with a new way to centralize it.
With a bare metal server you have to manage all of that.
It's not a bed of roses in the physical world either, but you're simply wrong to say it's easy in the "Cloud" and hard in a DC/Bare Metal.
I find it amusing that people pretend without bare metal, you'll get all of that person's time back.