> do a lot of things with the cloud that I could not do if I had to rack servers
It's not a binary choice between cloud and physical racks in a data center. There is a wide range of options. Companies like Hetzner enables you to click a button and get a dedicated instance, while Digitalocean can provide you with a VM. Both options are cheap and doesn't require much time.
If you do this often, you probably also have an ansible setup to install the base software (like k8s or a simpler stack), you are ready to go within minutes. Just like you would have a terraform config for your cloud
It's not a binary choice between cloud and physical racks in a data center. There is a wide range of options. Companies like Hetzner enables you to click a button and get a dedicated instance, while Digitalocean can provide you with a VM. Both options are cheap and doesn't require much time.
If you do this often, you probably also have an ansible setup to install the base software (like k8s or a simpler stack), you are ready to go within minutes. Just like you would have a terraform config for your cloud