You know, you can't hand wave away all the additional costs of having anything in the cloud. You need lawyers to tell you your liability for using third parties. You need all that time and money engineering cloud solutions that work, that can scale, and aren't going cost tons of money. You need to factor all those multi-hour calls needed to get to a real person at the cloud company who isn't reading from a multiple choice book and actually knows what you're talking about. You need a rotation of people available 24/7 to know what to look for in the cloud instance and can handle things if / when they go sideways. All these costs are considerable and will often dwarf the costs of the oversimplified cloud estimate you're first given, particularly at startup scale. With an in-house team of systems administrators and colocated hardware, it's (almost) all well understood and abstracted away.
I wonder if people have actually thought about the costs you mention, or if the marketing forces that have led everyone to believe that everything should in the cloud are why people who've never done the slightest work in a datacenter think the cloud is the way to go. I hear it all the time, but people can't articulate real reasons aside from general handwaving about how much salary a company can save from getting rid of systems administrators. But I've also worked for companies that don't even have a single systems administrator of their own, and trust me - they pay much more money for everything as compared with paying for a good admin.
The curse of our industry: the majority of us are weak communicators, unable to explain why they sense the cloud is a poor choice. Meanwhile, the cloud sales people - picked because they are adept communicators - create a comprehensive reasoning mesh, literally playing with the in-house developers inability to explain the dangers they know and with which they are trying to snare the client.
I wonder if people have actually thought about the costs you mention, or if the marketing forces that have led everyone to believe that everything should in the cloud are why people who've never done the slightest work in a datacenter think the cloud is the way to go. I hear it all the time, but people can't articulate real reasons aside from general handwaving about how much salary a company can save from getting rid of systems administrators. But I've also worked for companies that don't even have a single systems administrator of their own, and trust me - they pay much more money for everything as compared with paying for a good admin.