Requisitions for non-cloud server resources can takes hours, days, and in some places weeks; even when there is availability depending on the org. At best it takes close to an hour compared to a few seconds in the cloud via a web dashboard.
Furthermore, If you have spiking workloads or hyper growth and can't do proper capacity planning - that's exactly the original AWS value prop, run a hybrid private/cloud environment and extend to the cloud when needed.
That being said, not every organization is as dysfunctional.
I think the best approach would be a hybrid one, where developers could spin up instances in the "cloud", and ops would migrate them into the main infrastructure when it made sense to do so.
This works great for gaming companies who can see 10x loads during the first few weeks/months of a new video game release.
I work for a Fortune 500 where we have to wait weeks for hardware. This is not unusual at non-tech companies.
I don't understand this argument. Startups usually do not have money to have physical servers sitting around just waiting to be utilized, not to mention the IT resources to stand up those servers just in case someone might need them later. You're saying that everyone has a ton of servers sitting in the rack just waiting to have containers deployed to them? Who?
From k8s webpage (https://kubernetes.io/): "Automatically places containers based on their resource requirements and other constraints, while not sacrificing availability. Mix critical and best-effort workloads in order to drive up utilization and save even more resources."
Furthermore, running k8s to pack containers into AWS instances that are are themselves actually full blown VMs running on a hypervisor is of course one way to do computing. It is perhaps worth considering that there are others, more direct ways that can be achieved more economically.
On prem delivery/provisioning is not slower when executed properly.