Yes, but that sunk cost is probably still lower than what you paid AWS for the option to scale up and down.
A really cheap server leasing deal will cost you yearly about as much as the purchase price of the server. With opaque AWS services it is probably more like a month of subscription to pay for the hardware that you are indirectly using.
Thankfully after they understood the problem it only took 8 months of procurement, techs going to the data center 10+ times with endless screw ups, and everyone pointing the finger at each other.
While the cloud sucks in many ways the traditional setup has big problems as soon as you hit a midsize company ime.
A cloud vendor (who will be nameless as I signed an NDA specifically that prevents me from disparaging them; but one of the big three) ran out of capacity for me and it was 3 months before they managed to fix it. -- that was with a couple million a month in spend.
Cloud is still servers; you just depend on someone elses capacity management skills and you hope that there isn't a rush to populate a location (like when a region goes down and everyone's auto-provisioners move regions to yours)
I have to deal with a grumpy finance guy that thinks my whole department is overpaid already, especially so if we might use the dreaded `CapEx` word.
They were entirely unusable.
Opening a relatively small file in notepad could take multiple minutes. OS click and typing response times were measured in seconds.
Despite wasting thousands of developer hours each year, they refused to upgrade their data center. Probably because doing so would have been a major budget fight that requires an executive to actually advocate for something instead of making their characteristic animalistic grunts of agreement.
For better or worse I haven't seen the same issue with cloud expenditure. It seems to be perceived as a necessary expense, rather than the engineering department getting ideas above their station.
Typing/executing in Powershell was just as slow
Once you have on-premises you need people that know switches, routers, rackmount server, hardware, virtualization, etc, plus keeping all of that properly maintained (security patches, IaC, periodic updates, analyzing performance, making sure it's properly architected, etc).
I often see people saying it's the same cost or less but it's really not. Unless you have no idea what you should be doing.
Virtualization, IaC, analyzing performance, right architecture etc is all for later, when you've grown enough to need that.
Yeah, I think it might be a different perspective about when that all should be done.
I tend to do that right from the beginning because I often see it snowball later on and nobody ever fixes it or does it "properly" (in my opinion, possibly not the right one).
But that's a good point, no doubt.