Also, a lot of smaller (and mid-sized) companies end up with tons of instances and all kinds of complex server infrastructure because their code is mind-bogglin

Also, a lot of smaller (and mid-sized) companies end up with tons of instances and all kinds of complex server infrastructure because their code is mind-bogglingly inefficient and falls over without it. You either fix their mountain of broken shit or you throw "cloud" at it. Relatedly, I've seen a lot of "we need to avoid & transition away from SQL database servers, they're slow and don't scale" in the wild when the problem is actually that the way SQL is being used is not simply not-advanced, but incompetent. Hundreds to thousands of queries per page load for no good reason, useless caching, little attention paid to indices, that kind of thing. Often Rails is involved. :-/