This is very true, but my point still stands: For a smaller team, the overhead of maintaining your own infrastructure is very significant compared to the resour

This is very true, but my point still stands: For a smaller team, the overhead of maintaining your own infrastructure is very significant compared to the resources you have. If you have, say, 10 engineers, having 3 of them doing DevOps fulltime means 30% of your engineering spending is going towards your infrastructure, even before we factor in capital costs and all of the other overhead—not to mention room for error—that comes with it (security, etc). And if you're small enough to only be able to afford 10 engineers, you're most likely not going to spend 3 engineers' salaries on the equivalent AWS services. So now you only need maybe a single DevOps person at most, and you get another engineer or maybe two for "free" that can work on your core product. I'm not saying it doesn't come with its own disadvantages, but there are a lot of benefits to going "all in" on cloud services. And obviously there are no absolutes—there are certain workloads that really do benefit more from dedicated hardware, even at smaller scales, and there are huge companies that are better off with cloud services (ex: Netflix).