Exactly. Hardware rental is one way to tackle provisioning. You're still left with all the other tasks required to bootstrap your own datacenter. As you build up the roll-your-own solution, you end up in the same place: hire IT headcount.

If you are a small startup looking to validate market fit, your best bet is Cloud + Kubernetes. If you are an established business with millions of daily customers and serious IT headcount budget, you may look into roll-your-own. The best orchestrator at that scale is, again, Kubernetes.

> Exactly. Hardware rental is one way to tackle provisioning. You're still left with all the other tasks required to bootstrap your own datacenter. As you build up the roll-your-own solution, you end up in the same place: hire IT headcount.

For a startup, building a datacenter isn’t required in the beginning.

I meant, literally renting existing hardware, in an existing datacenter. This is just a single step from renting VMs at AWS or GCE, but already improves costs significantly.

I think pacala's point still stands - if you rent hardware, there is still a larger effort involved around running scalable services (DR, auto-scaling/load balancing, deployments etc). If you rent hardware, you likely will need a larger dedicated % of resources dedicated to maintaining that, over OOTB service providers.

Edit: got user names wrong

you still have to go from bare metal in someone else's DC to having you software running on top of it, who's going to do all that config work? You're spending resources either way.

As I said before, thanks to container linux, that's 3 lines in a json config.

I've deployed a handful of servers automatically myself this way, and I'm still a student.

Saving about an order of magnitude in terms of costs, gaining flexibility, and the only additional work is so low that it costs a compsci student half an hour once (aka ~10€ in wages) — there's no reason not to do it.

That's not true in a whole lot of industries. Many (!) small shops simply can't choose the cloud because of various reasons (regulations, for example).