I agree with most of the article's sentiment. Cloud provider costs can pile up quickly.
But the most undersold value of the cloud, and where I see so far unbeatable value, is automation (single, unified API) and the ecosystem of tools it allows to flourish from it.
Yes, Ansible could replace some Terraform, CloudFormation or ARM/Bicep but it doesn't manage out of the box a component's lifecycle. That is, knowing how and when should a resource be created, storing that last applied state somewhere and, when there's a new change, knowing if a resource should be recreated or just updated.
But when there's a demand there's (eventually) tools.
But the most undersold value of the cloud, and where I see so far unbeatable value, is automation (single, unified API) and the ecosystem of tools it allows to flourish from it.
Yes, Ansible could replace some Terraform, CloudFormation or ARM/Bicep but it doesn't manage out of the box a component's lifecycle. That is, knowing how and when should a resource be created, storing that last applied state somewhere and, when there's a new change, knowing if a resource should be recreated or just updated.
But when there's a demand there's (eventually) tools.