I think for me, having to go to someone on-prem and saying I need X, Y, and Z to make this work has a high tenancy to lead to acquiring and purchasing additional hardware, setup, and costs. This requires a lot of prep in some organizations to make happen. Cloud on the other hand, it's extremely easy to spin up on hardware you do not own. The ability to be lean there is pretty awesome. It also can be put into your hands a lot easier than someone else.

On top of that, another cool benefit I've noticed lately is the fact AWS, Azure and the works have new tech and features coming out all the time. While you may just need a VM and SQL Server, you also have the ability to pivot towards other tech you may not event try because you just don't want to spend the time also finding a test bed, installing it yourself and all that jive. They do make it very accessible for you to try out Hadoop for example, or PostgreSQL, and so forth extremely easy.

But yeah, I could totally be fine with my existing hardware I could feel and touch. I could have my own dedicated disks that are not virtualized and all that jive. Sounds really awesome up until the point I pivot to needing more and needing it fast.