> I really don't see how "bare metal" saves any engineering time

This is because you are looking only at provisioning/deployment. And you are right -- node size does not impact DevOps all that much.

I am looking at the solution space available to the engineers who write the software that ultimately gets deployed on the nodes. And that solution space is different when the nodes have 10x the capability. Yes, cloud providers have tons of aggregate capability. But designing software to run on a fleet of small machines is very different from accomplishing the same tasks on a single large machine.

It would not be controversial to suggest that targeting code at an Apple Watch or Raspberry Pi imposes constraints on developers that do not exist when targeting desktops. I am saying the same dynamic now applies to targeting cloud providers.

This isn't to say there's a single best solution for everything. But there are tradeoffs that are now always apparent. The art is knowing when it makes sense to pay the Cloud Tax, and whether to go 100% Cloud vs some proportion of dedicated.

Overall, I agree that most people underestimate the runway that the modern dedicated server can give you.

I’ve seen multiple projects founder on the complexity of writing software for the cloud. Moving data from here to there ends up being way harder than anybody expected. Maybe teams with more experience build this into their planning, but from what I’ve seen, if you’re using the cloud, your solution ends up being 95% about getting data where it’s supposed to be and 5% application logic.