A simple google search for cal-maine profit margins produces a table that includes year over year change in many metrics. For example Year over year increase in net profit margins:
I agree, with the caveat that at scale it's cheaper to do it well yourself. If that weren't true, then Amazon would not be making money on EC2.
If you don't have sysadmins and network admins with the right experience, you can easily find yourself in a bad spot with single points of failure, servers that can't be easily replaced, oversubscribed PDUs, misconfigured switches/routers... and any number of other problems that aren't occurring to me right now.
If you don't have sysadmins with the right experience, there is a vast number of companies that can do this for you on a fractional basis on retainer. I was one of them.
The crossover point where cloud is more expensive is really low even if you have zero in-house experience. Exactly where it is depends on your amount of egress, as that is where AWS in particular really takes advantage of you.
(I created an account just to upvote and comment on this)
Absolutely, nevermind managing OS upgrades and needing to use configuration management to mitigate against drift. It took a lot of effort to make sure that each server was not a special snowflake that could not be reliably reproduced.
Also, dealing with vendor warranties, and being on hold with HP (or whoever), then assuring them you're running the latest firmware.. please for the love of god just replace the failed memory/disk/cpu.
I found the sheer physicality of computing infrastructure to be a source of exhaustion and burnout. It's a big part of the reason why I'm a software developer now :)
Feb 2022: Y/Y net profit margin is +119.63%
May 2022: Y/Y net profit margin is +1633.06%
Aug 2022: Y/Y net profit margin is +442.88%
Nov 2022: Y/Y net profit margin is +7890.32%