That's exactly what I am leaning to in my current job. Looking at the load of our servers I can comfortably put all our software on my gaming machine (which is mid-range!) -- with the DB included -- and I bet no request ever will be above 100ms.

IMO a lot of organizations should start re-investing in on-premise as well. Having a mid-range AMD EPYC server can serve most businesses out there without ever having more than 40% CPU usage.

That, plus scaling down Kubernetes clusters. Most companies absolutely didn't need them in the first place.

I don’t know about on-prem for serving external workloads; getting a reliable, redundant, high-speed connection can cost far more than paying for colocation at a DC that’ll do at least as good a job. If you’re lucky they’ll even install fire suppression systems.

Yep, can't argue with that.

Still, for the cloud I started preferring going for Rust (where applicable!) and optimizing the hell out of the performance hot-spots. So far the results have only been crushing successes. Horizontal scaling has been employed only as a means of backup instances with a load balancer in front of them. And for blue/green deployments.

Horizontal scaling hasn't been at all necessary otherwise. A $25 instance never got north of 15% CPU for one of the services I rewrote. I/O utilization never got beyond 60% and is usually 3-5%.

But I can agree that the cloud has unquestionable benefits. It's just that I feel that their number is gradually dwindling.