Why is it always public cloud (aws, gcp, azure) vs. "bring your own hardware and deploy it in racks".
There are multiple providers that offer VPS and ingress/egress for a fraction of the cost of public clouds and they mostly have good uptime.
There are multiple providers that offer VPS and ingress/egress for a fraction of the cost of public clouds and they mostly have good uptime.
The uptime in these DCs is very good (certainly better than AWS's us-east-1), and you get a very good price with tons of bandwidth. Most datacenter and colo providers can do this now.
I think people believe that "on prem" means actually racking the servers in your closet, but you can get datacenter space with fantastic power, cooling, and security almost anywhere these days.
That's because that is what on prem means. What you're describing is colocating.
On top is AWS lambda or something where you are completely removed from the actual hardware that's running your code.
At the bottom is a free acre of land where you start construction and talk to utilities to get electricity and water there. You build your own data center, hire people to run and extend it, etc.
There is tons of space in between where compromises are made by either paying a provider to do something for you or doing it yourself. Is somebody from the datacenter where you rented a rack or two going in and pressing a reset button after you called them a form of cloud automation? How about you renting a root VM at Hetzner? Is that VM on prem? People who paint these tradeoffs in a black and white matter and don't acknowledge that there are different choices for different companies and scenarios are not doing the discussion a service.
On the other hand, somebody who built their business on AppEngine or CloudFlare workes could look at that other company who is renting a pet pool of EC2 instances and ask if they are even in the cloud or if they are just simulating on-prem.
Which, first order approximated, is a function of (1) how big a company you are (aka "Can you even afford to hire two people to just do X?") and (2) how competitive the market is for X.
Colo and dedicated VMs are so reasonably priced because it's a standardized, highly-competive market.
Similarly, certain managed cloud services are ridiculously expensive because they have a locked-in customer base.
Which would suggest outsourcing components that have maximum vendor competition and standardization, as they're going to be offered at the lowest margin.
What kind of weird stuff are we talking?
Essentially very high security and throughput TRNG servers (with cryptographic signing and the like).
It reads like propaganda sponsored by the clouds. Scaremongering.
Clouds are incredibly lucrative.
But don't worry. You can make the prices more reasonable by making a 3-year commitment to run old outdated hardware.