Cloud is an abstraction over hardware. lLike any good abstraction, it makes certain tradeoffs.

Sometimes it makes sense to move to a lower level of abstraction, for performance, cost, or compatibility reasons. In this case, diving under the cloud and running your own servers could save 30% of your server costs.

Cloud adoption has shown that many (most?) companies prefer the convenience over cost savings. Maybe optimizing hardware spend is not the best way to optimize a business.