In my 25 years, I've run some really big on-prem workloads and some of the biggest cloud loads (Sendmail.org and it's mail servers and Netflix streaming). Here is why I like the cloud:
Flexibility.
When Netflix wanted to start operating in Europe, we didn't have to negotiate datacenter space, order a bunch of servers, wait for racking and stacking, and all those other things. We just made an API call and had an entire stack built in Europe.
Same thing we we expanded to Asia.
It also saved us a ton of money, because our workload was about 3x peak to trough each day. We would scale up for peak, and scale down for trough.
We used on-prem for the parts where that made sense -- serving the actual video bits. Those were done on custom servers with a very stripped down FreeBSD optimized just for serving video (so optimized that we still used Akamai for images). But the part of the business that needed flexibility (control plane and interface) were all in AWS.
Why would a startup use the cloud? Both flexibility and ease. There aren't a lot of experts around that can configure a linux box from scratch anymore. And even if you can, you can't go from coded-up idea to production in five minutes like you can with the cloud. It would take you at least a few hours to set up the bare metal the first time.
Linux admin still exists. Except that they are better paid than ever at cloud provider. What you're describing is more payroll flexibility than technical.
How is it not technical flexibility? No matter what talent you have on payroll, you can't spin up a whole datacenter's worth of machines in Europe in less than a day without a cloud provider.
And I mean less than a day from "I think we should operate in Europe" to "we are operating production workloads in Europe".
Flexibility.
When Netflix wanted to start operating in Europe, we didn't have to negotiate datacenter space, order a bunch of servers, wait for racking and stacking, and all those other things. We just made an API call and had an entire stack built in Europe.
Same thing we we expanded to Asia.
It also saved us a ton of money, because our workload was about 3x peak to trough each day. We would scale up for peak, and scale down for trough.
We used on-prem for the parts where that made sense -- serving the actual video bits. Those were done on custom servers with a very stripped down FreeBSD optimized just for serving video (so optimized that we still used Akamai for images). But the part of the business that needed flexibility (control plane and interface) were all in AWS.
Why would a startup use the cloud? Both flexibility and ease. There aren't a lot of experts around that can configure a linux box from scratch anymore. And even if you can, you can't go from coded-up idea to production in five minutes like you can with the cloud. It would take you at least a few hours to set up the bare metal the first time.