Where can I find competent sysadmins capable of managing a system like that on their own for $40,000 a year?
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.
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.