> Even with the massive margins, cloud computing is far cheaper for most SMEs than hiring an FTE sysadmin and racking machines in a colo.

That very much depends on your use case and billing period. Most of my public web applications run in a colo in Atlanta on containers hosted by less than $2k in hardware and cached by Cloudflare. This replaced an AWS/Digitalocean combination that used to bill about $400/mo.

Definitely worth it for me, but there are some workloads that aren’t worth it and I stick with cloud services to handle.

I would estimate that a significant amount of services hosted on AWS are paid for by small businesses with less reliability and uptime requirements than I have.

SMEs hire someone (an MSP) to manage their IT. They don't use AWS because AWS services are too low-level. AWS is chosen by people who should know better and mostly on the basis of marketing inertia.

Edit: And by people with too much money, which was until recently most tech companies.

Using AWS was supposed the way to avoid the cost of an ops team.

Now every developer also has to be DevOps, learning docker, kubernetes and CI systems instead of just focusing on development.

Also we all still have ops teams.

False equivalence IMO... devops/docker/CI were not required with "the old way" and neither are they now, why are you thinking that they are?

If your scale requires it, that's fine, but that would have been the case with or without AWS et al.

Another of my online lives is on guitar forums (TGP etc), populated by diverse set of non-geek characters. An eternal question that comes up is “why are they charging so much for this guitar? The parts can’t be that expensive. I bet I could just…”

And the only viable answer is the ol’ capitalist saw: they charge what buyers are willing to pay.

That never quite satisfies people though.

Employing labor full time is incredibly expensive in the US. Once you include overhead, taxes, benefits, etc. you can easily be paying 2x wage for a worker. Not to mention buying the goods. So yeah the parts for the guitar might cost X, but then it costs Y to store them and Z for the space to assemble them then A to pay the workers and B to ship them and C to market. It adds up. Without jumping to the EVILS of "Capitalism" a business costs money to run. I can't imagine guitar manufacturer margins are anything close to techs, probably <5%. Gemini tells me industry is around 3.8% so I don't think I am far off.

In this case, you would need to pay someone anyway. I never heard about an AWS account that didn't require at least one engineer in charge of it.

Why aren't they satisfied with merely pondering strats made in US vs Mexico vs Japan vs Indonesia? Careful reviews of quality versus price (which of course varied over time) always showed more correlation with sometimes-unwarranted reputation than with reality.

Amongst this crowd, “my buddy said” is data. Correlation analysis is not in the picture.