[Insanity]

The common argument of "our own hardware would be more profitable in X years" is typically countered with "but you need to pay engineers to maintain it, which adds to the cost".

Another advantage of not having to own the hardware is that it's easier to scale, and get started with new types of services. (i.e, datawarehouse solutions, serverless compute, new DB types,..).

I'm not trying to advocate for or against cloud solutions here, but just pointing out that the decision making has more factors apart from "hardware cost".

[unionpivo]

Depends on how stable your needs are, but sometimes its cheaper even when you considerer total cost and not just for big deployments.

In the past 2 or three years, we probably moved more services off the cloud than other way. That said one reason for that is that most new services are build in the cloud, so there are less services off the cloud than on it.

Cloud is best, when you are starting out, when you don't know what you need, need high velocity of adding new stuff, of have very burst like demand for either traffic or cpu etc. Or if you are just small developer only team.

But if you have applications that are relatively stable, are mostly feature complete and you don't expect much sudden growth etc, it's useful to run the numbers if cloud is still something you want/need.