$ 16:04 up 46 days, 7:02, 9 users, load averages: 3.68 3.56 3.18
US East 1 was down just over a year ago
https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/25/aws_down/
Meanwhile I moved one of my two internal DNS servers to a second site on 11 Nov 2020, and it's been up since then. One of my monitoring machines has been filling, rotating and deleting logs for 1,712 days with a load average in the c. 40 range for that whole time, just works.
If only there was a way to run stuff with an uptime of 364 days a year without using the cloud /s
(Also, OpEx vs CapEx financial shenanigans...)
All the same, I don't disagree with your point.
When it's down, it's my problem, and I can't do anything about it other than explain why I have no idea the system is broken and can't do anything about it.
"Why is my dohicky down? When will it be back?"
"Because it's raining, no idea"
May be accurate, it's also of no use.
But yes, Opex vs Capex, of course that's why you can lease your servers. It's far easier to spend company money with another $500 a month on AWS than spend $500 a year for a new machine.
In the cloud you're at the mercy of someone who doesn't even know you exist to fix it, without the protections that say an electric company has with supplying domestic users.
This thread has people unable to turn their lights on[0], it's hilarious how people tie their stuff to dependencies that aren't needed, with a history of constant failure.
If you want to host millions of people, then presumably your infrastructure can cope with the loss of a single AZ (and ideally the loss of Amazon as a whole). The vast majority of people will be far better off without their critical infrastructure going down in the middle of the day in the busiest sales season going.