Maybe this is my old-school sysadmin showing, but how is managing a rack server more difficult than managing an EC2 instance?
The hardware part is not difficult, if you've built a PC you can set up a rack server (it's arguably easier because they're built to assemble without needing tools), and the software is all Linux on both, no? Or do you mean hiring on-site engineers within driving distance of your rack servers is difficult?
The pieces aren't difficult in isolation, but the combined logistical total cost of operational ownership is high and includes huge tail risks. When your metal fails, it stays down until physically fixed. Depending on your business, that's either acceptable or not.
We mitigate that risk by having our backup servers and database replicas in the cloud, but the big beefy primary machines are bare metal run on cheap Quebec power w/ unlimited 1Gbps residential bandwidth.
For those generations of people who grew up by being able to spin up servers with a few mouse clicks, doing that manually seems like a whole level of professional skills.
I feel almost the opposite. The AWS console seems so chaotic and needlessly complex to me compared to the simple familiarity of plugging in a hardware server. Maybe I'm an old geezer already but I'm not even that old!
When you can effectively spawn a new server with a command line you've got saved in your notes... it kinda feels a bit inefficient to be physically building and deploying them yourself.
It's also really pretty amazing to be able to spin up instances or services to test with for however many hours you need and then simply release them again.
Once you've got used to that level of freedom and convenience it's hard to go back, everything just moves faster.
But I have a beefy server with capacity for many extra VMs for a fraction of the price, so I can still spin them up on a whim. The power use is proportional to system load so I'm not paying much continuous overhead, just the up-front cost of having a larger server.
