>"Invariably, their response has been to tell me that I just don't get it"
I cured this one when my native server running on not so expensive multicore CPU with enough RAM left their cloudy setup in a dust performing more than a 100 times faster and still having huge potential reserve in vertical scalability. They were just astonished at what a single piece of modern hardware in combination with the native code could do.
Congratulations, from now on you are on call 24/7 in case anything happens to that machine. It is now your own pet. When RAM fails in unpredictable random ways, you'll spend hours reading the syslogs. When your SSDs fail, you'll spend hours ordering new ones, setting raid up and migrating the backups you've had to provision, automate, supervise and secure yourself.
When the server gets even remotely suspected of having been hacked into, you must trash it overnight and never use any of it again.
You talk like using a physical server somehow prevents building a highly available system or from using automation. Why would the hardware be any more of a pet than any random VM in the cloud? You could also just run a hypervisor on the host and get the benefits of virtualization along with full control of hardware.
Sure, if a drive breaks you'd probably want to replace it instead of just replacing the entire machine; it's a thing you don't need to do with VMs, but that doesn't mean it's difficult. It definitely doesn't take "hours".
Managing physical setups is different from managing fleets of cloud instances, but it's not necessarily automatically inferior.
>"You talk like using a physical server somehow prevents building a highly available system or from using automation. Why would the hardware be any more of a pet than any random VM in the cloud?"
It is pure scaremongering and making not very nice assumptions about people's abilities without any real substance. If this is the idea of attracting customers or advocating the approach it seems like a very poor job.
I always have up to date standby for a fraction of money they spend on cloud. In the last 10 years or so I do not remember RAM failing in an unpredictable ways. When/if my SSD fails It'll take me a whole 10 minutes ordering another one from amazon. Oh and I always have spares lying around. My backups are automated.
Anyways nice job advertising cloud and trying to scare people into using it. You happy with it - good for you. No need to convince me as I have my own reasons and do not have to buy into yours.
> "...I do not remember RAM failing in an unpredictable ways."
I'm about halfway through my career and I have seen something like that happen exactly once; the erratic behavior of the machine had my team scratching our heads for a fair bit until we ran memtest86 on it after running out of ideas. So I would say that it's not impossible, just extraordinarily unlikely.
Things did happen with my stuff as well. I had graphics card semi failed in an unpredictable way so I just replaced it. I also had one system randomly crashing because thermal paste dried up on one ancient CPU. It is just a little annoyance that happens extremely rarely. Anything is possible and I'll deal with it when/if. Nothing world shattering here. Cloud can and does fail as well. The list of reported outages affecting large chunks of customer beats my accidental cases with the healthy margin.
I cured this one when my native server running on not so expensive multicore CPU with enough RAM left their cloudy setup in a dust performing more than a 100 times faster and still having huge potential reserve in vertical scalability. They were just astonished at what a single piece of modern hardware in combination with the native code could do.