I'm familiar with the arguments for cloud. I'm also old enough to have been heavily involved in the operation of companies that did all this sort of stuff, on

I'm familiar with the arguments for cloud. I'm also old enough to have been heavily involved in the operation of companies that did all this sort of stuff, on physical hardware, for rather less money than today's cloud offerings cost. And "the cloud" is not a magical wand for reliability, either. How many times a year does one of AWS's regions being down (or something with CloudFlare being down) front page HN, because a substantial swath of the internet has stopped working? I'm not saying cloud is never the right answer. However, I do think that anymore, it's such the "default option" that very few people even consider the possibility of hosting their own hardware somewhere. I'm pretty sure I was the first random individual to come talk to my colo in years, because it sure looks like they spun up a "shared rack" for me.