Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what does that change my initial observation that the vast majority of companies don’t need more than the most basic cloud services?
Who are these vast majority of companies? The second company I worked for between 2000-2008 that I spoke about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42985966 With 20-30 people on staff if I were responsible for that architecture today. I would need: A MySQL instance with read replicas (we had that back then onsite) SQL Server for a some legacy projects - we had those too. File Transfer family for FTP transfers a…
You need to find the right balance between an expert IT team and cheaper employees. Using pre-baked cloud services is always easier, requires less management, but the operational expenditure is higher while the staffing cost might be lower. Where the company is based will also impact the professionals you'll have access to - there are places where you can have highly skilled people, and places where you'll struggle to even fully staff your IT operation.
> Do you propose that we should have hosted all of that on some VMs?
What do you think Amazon uses to run the services you pay for? Unicorns?