I tend to agree with you, but I don't have the data to back it up. Do you have any success stories to share of modern products that operate at scale on simple,

I tend to agree with you, but I don't have the data to back it up. Do you have any success stories to share of modern products that operate at scale on simple, dedicated hardware configurations? It seems to me, like most things in software these days, we sacrifice performance for convenience at every turn; and in the cloud case specifically we also pick up a good portion of complexity which rarely pays dividends. I'd wager that for most non-global scale products you can spend a few thousand dollars at the local PC shop and assemble some hardware that will more than support your needs. Although, I'd still advocate backing up necessary data in the cloud for resiliency. If your software is super resource intensive then you could have people install and run it locally gasp.