As an indie, lone dev, I can run my site, email and a basic web app for about 10 USD a month and, if my app kicks off, I can scale it to a million users without breaking a sweat.
To me, that is the true power of the modern cloud computing paradigm. An influx of great apps and services enabled by cheap scalable and sweet competitive cloud services.
Was this even possible in 2000?
I was running multiple sites by myself. There was less encapsulation (unless you were working with someone on bsd), for sure, but I'd say the advantages are more visible in terms of security (hacking was much easier back then) than ease to deploy.
Doing your own ops has never been that hard (YMMV) and I don't think it improved much nowadays. Scaling to n machines didn't change as well. Deploy n instances, load balancers, scaling vertically then horizontally, db sharding. You still have the same fundamentals.
One pro of today is having a single artifact to deploy (tons of cowboys deployments and FTP uploads in the past).
One big cons you have nowadays is learning all the latest crap $currentCompany is using and having to peel the layers of abstractions to see why things work so badly.
I kind of disagree. It's doable, but still requires maintenance. For instance, even running a simple blog off of a VPS requires you to worry about setting up an SSL certificate and keeping it renewed, staying on top of security updates, and putting together some kind of scaling solution assuming you ever want to write a post which gets to the front page of hacker news.
I think there's definitely an argument at a certain scale to just outsourcing that complexity so you can actually work on what contributes to your unique value proposition.
Most users of the top public clouds are paying 2-10x more than they should just because using the public cloud "is what you do".
Also, which bare metal server providers would you recommend?
Isn't it usually a mistake to design your app to be scalable to 10,000 users when all you may ever have is 10?