It's just becoming more specialized. You can still run bare-metal servers if you want, either colocating them or else running unmanaged VMs (or yes, hosting it

It's just becoming more specialized. You can still run bare-metal servers if you want, either colocating them or else running unmanaged VMs (or yes, hosting it on your own infra if your company is big enough). And of course there are entire companies dedicated to hosting global infra for other companies, so if that's the part of the stack you like, working at one of those will get you a lot of exposure to "running your own servers". But for smaller or medium sizes businesses, that part of it adds no business value and it's easier to just outsource it to the cloud, the same way that wouldn't necessarily want to build & maintain their own cars or laptops or electricity grid. When you can trivially host a small to medium scale website on managed infra from free to like $20/mo, it doesn't make sense to manage it yourself. Even a regular package or OS update will cost you more than that just in labor.