At the end of the day, we want operating expenses, not capital expenses.
And if you purchase a ton of bare metal and suddenly your business needs change it will not be easy or quick to move that much metal or install new metal in place.
Stick to the cloud.
Ultimately it's all capex. The choice is whether the capital asset is on your balance sheet or someone else's.
If someone else is tying up their capital in a depreciating and inflexible asset, they'll demand to be paid well for giving you the flexibility to avoid all of that.
So you can't really say opex is always better than capex, since it depends on the price you're willing to pay for that flexibility.
2 years ago we build thumbor-like apps in python using vibora and opencv. A single aws m8 large($80/month?) can serve hundred millions images resizing in a month.
At that time we build it with only 2 people, copy pasting code from internet in a few days and vibora’s github readme also state that its in alpha release. With $2K server, you need to cheat to make those inefficient implementation :)
Side note: Several weeks later I found out about thumbor and replace our ‘emergency work’ with dockerized thumbor
I also tinkered with thumbot in aws lambda. But the cost raised to $500/month. I think we did something wrong with aws rekognition.
There's plenty of hidden costs though of doing this yourself that need a certain level of scale to pay off. Like people to manage the hardware, that's a big one.
Still renting bare metal servers from e.g. Packet could make much more sense even for small companies than using AWS.
No. At one time over 10 years ago, I had a dedicated server with one of the hosting companies. They charged me $225/month.
I moved to AWS and my cost dropped to ~$30/month. Even now, 10 years later, my total AWS bill for primarily EC2 and RDS services that runs an application that pays my bills is ~$75 per month.
If my company suddenly went viral and had a bunch of new customers, I could scale up instantly.