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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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It's a case by case thing, but in a lot of cases the cloud is worse than self-run infrastructure from a cost perspective.
But self-hosting has other non-monetary costs such as the organizational complexity of having to have a giant in-house IT department that knows how to build and maintain that infrastructure, when none of it may be deeply related to the core of what the business is about.
Also, the cloud may be able to compete well against self-hosted stacks with your existing IT department across feature sets price wise in an apples-to-apples comparison, but not everyone needs everything the cloud provides. In some cases, it's not even necessary or desired to have everything connected and available on the Internet.
Saying that self hosting has those costs but cloud doesn't is a bit of a misnomer. In a decently run IT environment you still need someone to manage your cloud instances and watch for bad practices. In fact, the guy who does that in the cloud is probably more expensive than the guy who does it in a self hosted situation.
You're likely right, but that's the sales pitch. I don't believe it for the most part. I've been at two companies that made a cloud "transition" while I was working there over the last decade and they're always surprised, shocked, and immediately spring into cost cutting measures as soon as they get the bill. (Meanwhile I'm there like "how could they not see this coming?")
Another point worth making is that if you already have an IT department, a software development staff, or software is a large part of your business... development and testing in the cloud have big, big costs versus running a test environment on your own hardware. And you can try to skip it, but enjoy testing the actual system in production because it will not be the same.