I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…
I work with small businesses, and 90% of the time, they are better served by running a few VMs in a 1U Xeon-powered rackmount Synology or the like. Does it have a lot of compute power? No. Is it dirt-simple to admin, and have enough horsepower to do the simple things like run a QuickBooks server on a Windows VM, Fileshare on another, test on a third, etc that is all they usually need? Absolutely! It isn't uncommon at…
Often it's not though.
It's a pain to admin for someone who knows nothing about it, and it's also a pain to have to do anything at all!
The power of the cloud for smaller shops is that the don't have to know what Synology is, or even give it a thought.
That you click point-click and set up an EC2 with some S3 and get rid of most admin knowledge/know-how is like magic.
That's the best reason to use it, even it costs 1-3x as much.
Once there is A) stability and predictability in requirements and B) sufficient scale - then - we can hire smart people such as yourself who know better, to set up something relatively simple, that will be relatively low maintenance (i.e. whatever you bill) and save some $.
Think Development vs. Operations cost.
If in dev, we have to wait for, mess with, configure things, it's very expensive, delays etc. and we don't want that.
Once there's enough predictability to determine 'unit cost' on the services side ... then you can 'cut costs' by moving to a slow-changing, custom solution, that is hopefully 'simple', as you say.