And how many extra 'DevOps' people has the company now had to employ to manage these physical servers, and what is their annual salary? This never seems to be factored into the calculations.
Remember, Amazon built its cloud not for the public, but for itself! The cloud gave them a clean separation of duties and cost management between application development and operations. That sort of thing can save large amounts of money and bureaucratic headache. They started selling AWS to the public only after they had a stable system that could produce excess capacity, which could then be resold.
Disclaimer: I work for AWS.
Instant snowflake, just add expensive and archaic enterprise middleware.
You could triple your provisions with the savings of not being on the cloud, so it's hard to believe you won't see the train coming, if the concern is having to rack more than 20-60 servers a day. Arguably, that would be a good problem to have!