[m1keil]

If you are at the point of having to deal with individual servers and have a very fast-paced development (startup), or have to deal with very burstable traffic spikes (say e-commerce), cloud is probably your friend.

But sometimes you just need more compute and you are the type of organization that buys compute by the floor space and power consumption...

Regardless of the nuances of each situation, I think jsiepkes's comment meant to say that in the data center you can buy pretty killer hardware that will be totally overkill for the moment and won't require you to count active timeseries in order to not pay $300k a month for your metrics, and at the same time will last you for the next couple of years.

Also, for most companies, the next point of inflection will never come and this server will probably last them for a very, very long time.

I'm sharing my point of view as someone who works at an organization that took money as the only consideration and managed to grow over the years to now having to start taking both time and money into consideration because taking only money into consideration proves to be too expensive.

[patmorgan23]

And you don't have to pick just cloud or on-prem, you can utilize both. Use cloud for your bursty workloads, or for it's CDN/edge, and then your on-prem for consistent workloads. As long as you're not using cloud specific services you can run open source versions on-prem (such as minio for S3, or your own Postgres cluster, or kubernetes + what ever operator)

[AznHisoka]

And you don’t have to operate your own servers or rent out space either. There’s things like dedicated servers and VPS’s…