From my PoV, using cloud instead of self hosting, rarely makes economic sense. Most of the time is more expensive than paying for the infrastructure and person

From my PoV, using cloud instead of self hosting, rarely makes economic sense. Most of the time is more expensive than paying for the infrastructure and personnel to manage it. Also, while apparently cloud reduces complexity, it will end up adding lots of other complexities. And dealing with complexity means more money. Also, the more you invest in a particular cloud technology, the more locked in you are, the less alternatives you have and that means paying up more. If Stack Overflow does well by managing few dedicated servers, I don't get why smaller operations really "need" cloud. And to add another perspective, the more layers of abstraction and indirection you add, the more complicated and ineficient things will be.