No doubt people will be commenting here on how cloud makes sense because you don’t have to hire experts to run your own computers.

Folks…… it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it.

Cloud is more expensive and slower often more complex, and risks major vendor lock-in if you use the cloud vendors APIs instead of open source solutions.

And if you need GPU computing you’d be crazy to use cloud GPUs which are much, much more expensive and much much slower than consumer grade GPUs.

And if you can summarise which parts of your system are incurring traffic costs then you’re beating the deliberately complex systems intended to nickel and dime your architecture every time a byte turns a corner.