It's the opposite. A good SRE can build a system faster and cheaper in the cloud, and only self-host the things that make sense.
You need a half dozen engineers working full time to replicate what the cloud gives you, and still buy the hardware ahead of time. That's 6 months of straight project development with 6 people and capital for a rack full of gear.. that's like $1.5M USD outlay for one year. For close to feature parity for core services I mean, nobody would normally build all that just to put a crappy web app online.
OR hire one SRE to set up a cloud stack in two months and only pay for what you use, $200K for one year or $100K for a short contact.
You need a half dozen engineers working full time to replicate what the cloud gives you, and still buy the hardware ahead of time. That's 6 months of straight project development with 6 people and capital for a rack full of gear.. that's like $1.5M USD outlay for one year. For close to feature parity for core services I mean, nobody would normally build all that just to put a crappy web app online.
OR hire one SRE to set up a cloud stack in two months and only pay for what you use, $200K for one year or $100K for a short contact.