Comment by ManBeardPc

The cloud enables you to scale. It allows us to distribute systems across multiple regions and data centers. Seems that this is true for outages as well.

The PHP application I wrote as a student running on a single self-hosted server had a higher uptime than any of the cloud providers or redundant system I have seen so far. If you don’t need the cloud for scalability, do it yourself and save yourself the trouble and money. Most companies would be better off investing into some IT staff instead of giving away their systems in the hands of some proprietary and insanely complex cloud environment. You are becoming dependent on someone you don’t know, have no control over and can’t talk with directly. Also the single point of failure is just shifting: from your system to whatever system is managing the cloud. Guess one advantage is that you can shift the blame to someone else…