Are you saying you don't need those because your compute is in the cloud? Who's operating those VMs? Who's hardening the OS images? What about software licensi

Are you saying you don't need those because your compute is in the cloud? Who's operating those VMs? Who's hardening the OS images? What about software licensing? Whatever license is required to run a software on-prem is probably exactly the same to run it on an EC2 instance. Running in the cloud doesn't suddenly absolve you from having to pay licenses for the software. That would be piracy. This particular EC2 instance costs 2.5k/month. The MacBook in question costs what, 2x that? 3x? Let's exagerate and say it's 5x, so US$12.5k once. That machine is likely to last years in operation. Are you saying all those years at 2.5k/month for each instance is not enough to pay a team to operate them? Note that I'm not against doing things in the cloud. Many times, perhaps even most of the time, it's the right decision. That doesn't mean it's always the right one.