The comments here are largely unquantified opinions that haven't really changed in 10 years or so, more that there are far more people that have those opinions.

The comments here are largely unquantified opinions that haven't really changed in 10 years or so, more that there are far more people that have those opinions. Ten years ago I loved the cloud because it broke the monopoly / organizational dictatorship of IT in large organizations, always a wellspring of "daily wtfs". But now the cloud is becoming too powerful, and too small in number. We NEED a competitive-ish on-prems approach... but... what is it? Does anyone have a template to do so? They aren't well advertised that's for sure. AWS is NOT CHEAP. It may be slightly cheaper than the old monolith IT orgs' DCs, and far more flexible, but it's not cheap. There has to be a way to accept less flexibility for substantial savings over reserved instances and negotiated discounts. For christsakes, a Raspberry Pi would make a perfectly good server for massive ranges of use cases. 20$ and ultra low power.