Yes, but cloud scales in a way dedicated servers simply cannot. I agree that a lot of people use cloud when they shouldn't, but there are a number of cases where it remains very relevant.
1. Eight socket R1 (LGA 2011) supports
Intel® Xeon® processor E7-8800 v4/v3
family (up to 24-Core)
2. Up to 24TB in 192 DDR4 DIMM slots
That's 192 cores / 384 threads with 24TB of DDR4 RAM
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The amount that you can vertically scale with physical servers is far above and beyond what is offered by cloud services. Although I'm impressed that Amazon is now at the 2TB DDR4 RAM level.
> Scaling vertically only buys you time until you are forced to scale horizontally.
Why not both?
> That and "one huge server" is rarely the best design decision.
I never claimed to build only one server. Only that dedicated scales vertically far more than cloud.
There's absolutely nothing stopping me from buying multiple 4TB servers if I wanted to. The reason you go vertical is because Intel's QPI is ~25.6 GB/s (That's big-bytes: so over 200Gbit), far faster than any switch or router on the market. (10-gbit Ethernet, or maybe fiber at 40-gbit if you go really expensive)
You CANNOT scale processes faster than Intel's QPI. Vertical scaling gives you faster communications than even the most expensive switches on the market.
I do releases by baking a new virtual machine with the code+config built in and booting it. I guess it's possible to do that on real hardware, but calling it simply "harder" borders on disingenuous.
I basically do that for my Xen VMs with NixOps in the "no provisioner" mode. Would be exactly the same for bare metal, plus I get dev VMs that match the prod environment for free.
Want to build a 1TB DDR4 RAM beast with 40 cores? Yeah, you can do that with dedicated.