Agreed - I worked for a company with 30 people dedicated entirely to managing the mess they'd created in AWS - and their AWS account manager somehow managed to keep convincing them to use more and newer AWS services to dig them in even further.

People talk about resume-driven development, which is definitely a factor, but there's also fear-driven development - you have a hunch the architecture could be a lot simpler and cheaper, but you don't want to make any criticism in case the others in your team think you are technically ignorant, inexperienced, out of touch etc.

>Let's keep in mind that modern hardware and software is very stable, generally

Not at any significant scale. dimm will fail, power will be down, disks will need replacement.

It is all about risks after all. If you are ok to have couple of hours of downtime if one of the memory sticks stops working - good for you. But generally any large enough business won't tolerate such risks.

I'm not saying that the cloud is the answer, but I don't see any future for single instance solution. And if you design your system like this, you are taking much more risks than necessary.