You're thinking about it the wrong way. Sure you're not paying salaries, but now you're paying for experts who understand the cloud and you're paying more for t

You're thinking about it the wrong way. Sure you're not paying salaries, but now you're paying for experts who understand the cloud and you're paying more for those people compared to datacenter people. At Azure I was surprised how many data center people didn't even have a college degree and how little they were paid. Ultimately the only thing that matters is the total cost. To take true advantage of the cloud you need to use cloud specific technologies - serverless being the greatest example. Cloud VMs are neat and all, but in a sense it's the worst of both worlds. I'm not saying there isn't value in the cloud. I'm saying most people are overpaying. BigCloud didn't solve this any more than paying employees in general to solve your problems. With the era of free money coming to the end, many companies will come to this realization themselves in any case. BigTech clouds have 50%+ margins - something will give eventually. Any serious company is still going to have to pay oncallers, and admins with or without cloud. It's not like using the cloud absolves you from maintenance (pretty much every company with a valuation more than 100 million has an infrastructure team, and uses the cloud. So clearly the cloud doesn't mean you don't have to maintain your own infrastructure). And now we come back to my point - why isn't the fleet easier to maintain to begin with? I'm not even talking about bare-metal necessarily. Say you use VMs. Still a huge hassle.