I cant take this article seriously, its just some person refusing to adapt because "in my days we did it differently"

I think you paint the whole world with the bleeding edge brush. Many fortune 500 companies are a decade behind the technology stacks described in the article and in this discussion.

Hybrid cloud installations to leverage cloud computing resources are becoming more and more "the norm". In that context having apps and services pre-packaged for deployment in heterogenous environments is strategic power.

"The cloud" tends not to be cheap, but using cloud services to carry out jobs your dedicated site never could hope touch is something with business value.

And in regards to scripts or docker. No you wouldn’t need to rewrite everything.

Web development is full of engineering astronauts who think they need 8 levels of abstraction to solve relatively simple problems. Oh, and for that 0.1% that does actually switch, they soon realize they're abstractions weren't as good as they thought they were and they have to reimplement every interface anyway.

In regards to setting up a new server for a new provider, or docker, you have some boiler plate:

-> create script to attach docker to provider

New provider...

-> create new script to attach docker to provider

----

-> create script to provision server on provider

-> run generic script to configure it how I want

New provider

-> create new script to provision server on provider

-> run generic script to configure it how I want

In this regard, moving from 1 provider to another, is identical.

How do I abstract this unique idea of IOPS that AWS has?

So how do Hetzner, OVH, Rackspace, and hundreds of other companies stay in business?

Hint: cloud services are in fact way more expensive on every single metric. But they are more flexible.