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> The number one reason and tradeoff for cloud is uptime and availability and the cost of not having it

Uptime? There have been quite a few catastrophic cloud failures. And some lasted hours.

Five nine is something like 5 minutes of downtime a year. The clouds aren't anywhere near that.

If you use it correctly, with multiple availability zones and even multi regions you can reach very high reliability. They surely don't offer five 9s for a single zone. I am not aware of many multi regions outages. And they are also getting better over time, spending a lot more engineering hours on reliability that most companies. And if they fail to deliver on SLA they might give you money (depending on your contract I guess).

Do you really think on-prem has more uptime than commercial cloud? For non-tech companies, no even close. Commercial cloud is adding nines to uptime and saving money by removing in-house IT admin staff.

the biggest miscalculation is really on expected uptime. People say they need 5 nines, yet take their car in for service twice a year for a tire rotation and oil change. How much uptime is _really_ required?

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