But the ultimate cost in everything is the cost of labor. On-premise solutions require on-premise administrators, with full time salaries (who are mostly sitting around waiting for work or problems to arise). It is far simpler and cheaper to contract the work out to a cloud provider and pay hourly for a tech's time. If you are a highly competent sysadmin you probably aren't working at a dental implant company. So the kinds of people non-tech companies hire are usually going to be lower quality and get paid less, increasing security risks
Companies use the cloud because then they don't have to hire a dozen sysadmins to manage their servers, they can focus on building the actual product.
If I can choose between having 12 developers who can manage AWS and having a rotation of 8 sysadmins wrangling in-house servers in three shifts and 4 developers, I'll always choose the one with more developers.
It’s also a once off (kind of), and there are very established patterns to follow.
The value of cloud computing is that it gets business logic in production fast with unlimited flexibility and a reduced dependence on cost center specialists in areas like operations, security, and database administration.
With cloud computing I can deploy my entire stack to a region in another part of the globe with ~10 lines of configuration, terraform apply and it’s done. I’m doing things by myself that I used to rely on multiple other people to handle (like setting up and maintaining databases, networking, firewalls, security tooling, etc).
I also used to waste a bunch of time maintaining vendor products that had nothing to do with the business. I used to have responsibilities like Jira administrator - ick!
The last time I worked for a company that had an on-premise data center I had a months-long email chain where I was told we were basically out of storage in a specific region so I had to wait for the VMs I requested.
Quite right CRDTs are not magic, but they do get you something like 80-90% of the way there for most CRUD style apps. There is also a bunch of work going on into developing new CRDTs for different use cases.
What's important is articles like this help us to explain to less technical people what local first is, the advantages it has. They help to sell the concept.
But ultimately Wired is entertainment isn't it.