I agree and disagree, the benefit with cloud is you "don't need to manage it", it scales automatically, redundancy, and automatic backups etc. I do think you are right; in the future there will be more infrastructure as code as cost pressures become more obvious.

Those benefits are at least partly lies though.

The tooling — K8S with all its YAML, Terraform, Docker, cloud CLI tools, etc. — is pretty hideously ugly and complicated. I watch people struggle to beat it into shape just like they did with sysadmin automation tools like Puppet and Chef a decade or more ago. We have not removed complexity, only moved it.

The auto scaling thing is a half truth. It can do this if you deploy correctly but the zero downtime promise is only true maybe half the time. It also does this at greatly inflated cost.

Today you can scale with bare metal. Nobody except huge companies physically racks anymore. Companies like Hetzner and DataPacket have APIs to bring boxes up. There’s a delay, but you solve that by a bit of over provisioning. Very very few companies have work loads that are so bursty and irregular that they need full limitless up and down scaling. That’s one of those niche problems everyone thinks they have.

The uptime promise is false in my experience. Cloud goes down for cluster upgrades and any myriad other reasons just as often as self managed stuff. I’ve seen serious unplanned outages with cloud too. I don’t have hard numbers but I would definitely wager that if cloud is better for uptime at all it’s not enough of an improvement to justify that gigantic markup.

For what cloud charges I should, as the deploying user, receive five nines without having to think about it ever. It does not deliver that, and it makes me think about it a lot with all the complexity.

The only technical promise it makes good on, and it does do this well, is not losing data. They’ve clearly put more thought into that than any other aspect of the internal architecture. But there’s other ways to not lose data that don’t require you to pay a 10X markup on compute and a 10000X markup on transfer.

I think the real selling point of cloud is blame.

When cloud goes down, it’s not your fault. You can blame the cloud provider.

IT people like it, and it’s usually not their money anyway. Companies like it. They’re paying through the nose for the ability to tell the customer that the outage is Amazon’s fault.

Cloud took over during the ZIRP era anyway when money was infinite. If you have growth raise more. COGS doesn’t matter.

Maybe cloud is ZIRPslop.