It's covered more elsewhere in this thread, and I appreciated learning about it.
I wouldn't say that renting managed servers is simple at scale.
But it is both simpler and less expensive when not at scale.
…unless they are not physical servers but vservers. Hetzner, for instance, has such a "cloud" offering where you can dynamically spin up new vservers via an API/Terraform.
They represent yet another point on the spectrum but are not "fully cloud" yet if we take "fully cloud" to mean that, beyond hardware, the software stack is partly managed by a third party, too.
Put differently, to me the spectrum looks more or less like this:
- On-prem self-hosting (own data center, own hardware etc.) - (Off-prem) non-managed hosting (data center provided by third party, but you're providing the server hardware and put it in one of their racks) - Managed hosting of physical servers (data center + server hardware provided by third party) - Managed hosting of vservers (Hetzner Cloud, AWS EC2, …) - "Full cloud": Software stack is partly managed by 3rd party (e.g. managed Postgres, managed Kafka, managed ElasticSearch, serverless, etc.)
You can provision dedicated servers with Terraform.
They can still be cloudy in the way you deal with hardware maintenance and risk of failure, and how you authenticate with them and how you name them, and how you hook them up on VPNs. But they're physical units without the AWS bells and whistles or the AWS premium. Not everyone needs their own colocated rack, and manage their own UPS and network peering.