> People who know bare metal are rare these days from the total of available infrastructure engineers

Sysadmins are not rare they're just not the people you hear about in Silicon Valley bubble anymore. 90+% of businesses haven't moved to the "cloud" (i.e. whoever the fuck's computer you can't get your hands on in case of problems) and even if they wanted to it would make no sense: most businesses just need a basic website and an email/accounting service. Cloud abstractions provide much complexity and zero benefits for such usecases.

> But in my experience people argue one option a lot without being to deliver the other.

I'm in this box. I can't deliver "cloud" computing and from a political perspective i refuse to "learn". Also, it makes no sense for the non-profit projects i work with: the biggest ones need at most a few servers which is still manageable by hand and certainly easier to deal with via Ansible/Chef than via new layers of abstractions and all their new failure modes (eg k8s/AWS).

Thank you for sharing this, it helps clear up the concern you had a lot.

I deal with some big German clients fairly frequently and one of the requirements is "[they] own the entire stack top to bottom, back to front." A lot of dark site operations I work on also share a similar requirement, so really it's why I'm far more open and comfortable with an all on premises situation since I see the scaling done without any public cloud.

From what I do work with on public cloud sure, I absolutely get why it is so easy to scale if you don't already have a good team to build and orchestrate a local set up. I also see some big name companies I contract with just throw money onto a fire fueled by Azure, and while the expenditure hurts sure, it's still considered acceptable.

I guess I probed because I see a lot of different sides of modern architecture and aside from a well documented and disciplined one, I'm not sure there's a right thing with modern architecture, just different comfort zones with different efficiencies.

There are few things we want to do on-premise any more. The main problem of on-premise, and benefit of cloud, is that we can add new capacity at a moments notice. You never have to wonder if you’ll need to add more capacity (with two month lead times) to provision a database.

Now you could say that infra teams that do not anticipate such a need are less than ideal, and I’d agree with you, but I haven’t been part of them and I imagine they have their own issues to deal with.

Cloud (as a dev) makes me not worry about infra teams, since they’re not our problem (beyond the ones managing the cloud environment).

Sub 100k engineers are a fiction. Sure, you could get somebody on staff for under 100k salary, but it's not necessarily going to be someone competent.

But even aside from that: OK, you found somebody who agrees to work for 90k. What about social security tax? Group health coverage? Workman's comp insurance? HR support? Payroll? Risk of lawsuits if someone hurts them/their feelings?

Thing is: many AWS customers have a sub-100k/mo bill. Savings from this sub-100k person will be relatively lower.

On top of that, for small/mid-sized companies, it's difficult to avoid "employee-lockin". It's perceived as a minor risk to have a vendor lock-in. Unfortunately, often they turn out to be right.