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Bare-metal is so cheap that you can turn everything to 11 to begin with, never have to worry about "scaling" and still come out ahead in terms of cost.

In fact, before the cloud craze came around, internet services used to run just fine despite autoscaling not being commonplace. For a lot of use-cases, autoscaling is a problem created by the cloud's high prices and is unnecessary if hardware is cheap enough to run continuously.

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The way I look at it is that the cloud doesn't run on the cloud. It's totally artificial.

That's only true if you don't factor people hours into your costs.

The vast majority of companies have one if not more DevOps/infrastructure engineers on payroll. The "people costs" only realistically works either for super-early stage companies where the founding engineer(s) also manage the infra or something that's simple and standard enough that it can run on a fully-managed PaaS such as Heroku.

But hey if you're gonna bring up people costs, shouldn't the simpler stack (because it doesn't need to autoscale) mean less management & maintenance overhead anyway?

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