"As stated below, cloud computing is just someone else's server somewhere. Unless you need that level of scalability, and processing, then it's not worth it."
I keep seeing people throw this around as if it's God's truth and it frustrates the hell out of me. It may be the case for your organization but everywhere I have worked (from startups to Fortune 500) the cloud allowed our engineers to focus on our product rather than infrastructure maintenance and contributed massively to our success.
The cloud provides convenience, which absolutely does have [some] value. That value usually does not approach the actual cost incurred for companies of a reasonable size (including, IMO, GitLab), but it does exist and it means that everyone should be able to find a smattering of uses for cloud.
The issue I think is that so many people just go balls-to-the-wall 1000% AWS and consider it a done deal, which is terrible, and then go around and telling everyone else they should do the same thing, which is also terrible.
The fact is that you can't just lay the responsibility for all of this in Amazon's lap. We'd be even less impressed if GitLab's excuse was "Yeah, we had the Amazon nightly snapshots enabled, so we only lost 19 hours of data" (whoever coincidentally took the backup 6 hours before the incident should get enough of a bonus to make his GitLab salary market-competitive!).
Amazon does start you out with some OK-ish defaults, which is better than allowing someone with 4 days of experience to set everything up, but ultimately that's not going to mean much in unskilled hands.
When it comes down to it, every company still need someone internal to take responsibility for their infrastructure; that means backups, security, permissions, performance, hardware, and yes, cost. If your company already has someone with those responsibilities, giving that person $500k to hire a few hardware jockeys is going to be much better than giving Amazon $3M to be the sole host for all of your infrastructure. If your company doesn't have anyone with these responsibilities, it needs to get on the stick, as GitLab has clearly demonstrated to us this month.
I keep seeing people throw this around as if it's God's truth and it frustrates the hell out of me. It may be the case for your organization but everywhere I have worked (from startups to Fortune 500) the cloud allowed our engineers to focus on our product rather than infrastructure maintenance and contributed massively to our success.