Comment by SicSemperUranus

> Let me rent real servers, but expose it in a "serverless" "cloud-like" way, so I don't have to upgrade the OS and all that kind of stuff.

I think you're describing platform-as-a-service? It does exist, but it didn't eat cloud's lunch, rather the opposite I expect.

It's hard to sell a different service when most technical people in medium-big companies are at the mercy of non-technical people who just want things to be as normal as possible. I recently encountered this problem where even using Kubernetes wasn't enough, we had to use one of the big three, even though even sustained outages wouldn't be very harmful to our business model. What can I say, boss want cloud.