This is a false dichotomy. There is the issue of restrictive IT departments, legal review, compliance review, extended QA, documentation, product literature, etc. all extending a product launch timeframe...
Separate from all of that there is a valid question whether the software stack at a big cloud provider gives your engineering department the ability to deliver features faster at scale and redundancy, and with lower ongoing maintenance overhead. I think this question is very much up for debate.
At a small scale there are absolutely cloud frameworks that let you deploy services without an IT department at large scale. But then there’s a realistic argument of whether the high premium for theoretical scale—when in actuality you’re serving dozens not millions of customers—is worth the high cost of capital.
E.g. several startups of mine have persistent on a couple colocated dedicated servers for over a decade at a cost of $300/mo. The equivalent deployment in the cloud is closer to $3,000/mo.
I know this because I got $300k of Azure credits to play around with and ended up not using most of them. The long-run cost was too high to move to Azure. But there were months when I “spent” $6k of credits on a dozen VMs and associated storage and network that had equivalent performance to my rented bare metal.
Separate from all of that there is a valid question whether the software stack at a big cloud provider gives your engineering department the ability to deliver features faster at scale and redundancy, and with lower ongoing maintenance overhead. I think this question is very much up for debate.
At a small scale there are absolutely cloud frameworks that let you deploy services without an IT department at large scale. But then there’s a realistic argument of whether the high premium for theoretical scale—when in actuality you’re serving dozens not millions of customers—is worth the high cost of capital.
E.g. several startups of mine have persistent on a couple colocated dedicated servers for over a decade at a cost of $300/mo. The equivalent deployment in the cloud is closer to $3,000/mo.
I know this because I got $300k of Azure credits to play around with and ended up not using most of them. The long-run cost was too high to move to Azure. But there were months when I “spent” $6k of credits on a dozen VMs and associated storage and network that had equivalent performance to my rented bare metal.