> With on premise, you need someone that will install racks, change disks, setup high availability block storage or object storage, etc. Those are not DevOps people.

we have 7 racks and 3 people. The things you mentioned aren't even 5% of the workload.

There are things you figure out once, bake into automation, and just use.

You install server once and remove it after 5-10 years, depending on how you want to depreciate it. Drives die rarely enough it's like once every 2 months event at our size

The biggest expense is setting up automation (if I was re-doing our core infrastructure from scratch I'd probably need good 2 months of grind) but after that it's free sailing. Biggest disadvantage is "we need a bunch of compute, now", but depending on business that might never be a problem, and you have enough savings to overbuild a little and still be ahead. Or just get the temporary compute off cloud.