I think i can beat that argument pretty easy, 5 freebsd hosts with each 100 running jails...it's cheaper, uptime is something to discuss, but the data is not on someone elses computer.
The real cost of cloud is that nearly anyone think it's impossible to setup a infra for yourself....loosing systemadmin as a role in companys probably the biggest loss.
Not "anyone", but probably most newcomers to the industry. Since they are simply not exposed to the non-cloud ways of setting up infra.
On ever AWS/cloud post here the first comment is usually rent dedicated boxes from Hetzner (or whomever) and you can cut your costs. (And especially now with k8s it is really really easy to have something sane on bare-ish metal.)
But at the same time what "cloud" gives to people is 20+ PoPs around the world. Basically giant hosting companies, with an endless list of bells and whistles.
What’s interesting is in the past 5-10y the technology to run your own smaller dc (on the order of few dozens of racks) had become extremely commoditized. You can buy 100G switches for pennies now and every piece of software has a high quality open source version down to bmc level. I believe we’ll see a reverse trend for established SV companies in the next 10 years
But at the same time "established SV companies" are already paying so much for labor costs that probably they don't want to hire anyone to run a DC for them.
Just task their existing staff to “run the dc”. Way easier to figure this out than grinding leetcodes if you ask me. Also you can rent pretty much everything in that chain these days so your existing “infra engs” can manage soft layer while you outsource all the management of hardware and below.
The real cost of cloud is that nearly anyone think it's impossible to setup a infra for yourself....loosing systemadmin as a role in companys probably the biggest loss.