This is a strawman that keeps getting brought up, but nobody's claiming that. The difference remains though and the scale depends on what exactly do you conside

This is a strawman that keeps getting brought up, but nobody's claiming that. The difference remains though and the scale depends on what exactly do you consider as an alternative. Renting a couple servers will cost you in availability/resilience and extra hardware management time. Renting a managed rack will cost you in the above and premium on management. Doing things yourself will cost you in extra contracts / power / network planning, remote hands and time to source your components. Almost everything that the AWS specialist needs to know comes in after that and has some equivalent in bare metal world, so those costs don't disappear either. In practice there are extra costs which may or may not make sense in each case. And there are companies that don't reassess their spending as well as they should. But there's no alternative realty really. (As in, the usually discussed complications of bare metal are not extremely overplayed)