Clowd was never cheap; it was versatile, and it still is.
Just, please, get over this ‘cheap’ fallacy. It’s expensive as shit, either in direct costs or the labour required to min-max for savings. If you’re not regularly bulldozing a massive portion of your stuff or running in two regions for resilience, then you should just look at another idea – and Don’t say Azure, as there’s a reason we call that cheap hot-garbage ‘unsure’.
thank you. came to the comments to say exactly this.
cloud could be cheap, but it’s a lot of work, or at least attention. people get disappointed with the costs, paradoxically, because cloud is easy and, as you put, versatile. and often between any two options allowing to do the same thing, the easier one will be more expensive.
the biggest irony of the cloud is that many companies it seems, just like different species evolved into crabs, discover that all they need is a couple of own servers in a managed hosting environment, a CDN and outlook.
Indeed.
Cloud is useful for things like flexibility - you need massive dynamic expansion/contraction of resources? Cloud can do it… But at a cost.
Or for a startup - you need resources quickly, but don’t want to invest in physical hardware because that’s a risky investment if the business doesn’t survive. But again, it’s not cheap.
Worst of all, each cloud provider has a convoluted system of features, by design, intended to lock you in to their system once you learn it. So you still have staff dedicated to that.
The problem with cloud is much better explained here (I have no idea who this person is, just found their blog to be well written).