And there is also a thrill of doing it, which other guys already mentioned.

In the past, I was trying to reproduce vibe coding results when I managed to get all the information from Youtube videos (model version, ide version, same input data and prompt) and never was I able to reproduce something impressive even after multiple runs of the same thing.

On Hetnzer (not affiliated), at this moment, i7-8700 (AVX2 supported) with 128 GB RAM, 2x1 TB SSD and 1 Gbit uplink costs 42.48 eur per month, VAT included, in their server auction section.

What are we missing here, besides that build farm was left to decay?

At my current project (Fortune 500 saas company, was there for both on-prem to cloud and then cloud-to-cloud migration):

a) Resources are terribly expensive. Usual tricks you find online (spot instances) usually cannot be applied for some specific work related reason. In our estimates, in contrast to even the hw/sw list-prices, cloud is 5x-10x more expensive, of course depending on the features you are planning to use.

b) There is always a sort of "direction" cloud provider pushes you into: in my case, costs between VMs and Kubernetes are so high, we get almost weekly demands to make the conversion, even though Kubernetes for some of the scenarios we have don't make any sense.

c) Even though we are spending 6 figures, now maybe even 7 figures on the infrastructure monthly, priority support answer that we receive are borderline comical and in-line with one response we received when we asked why our DB service was down, quote: "DB has experienced some issues so it was restarted."

d) When we were having on-prem, some new features asked from ops side, were usually implemented / investigated in a day or so. Nowadays, in most cases, answers are available after week or so of investigation, because each thing has its own name and lingo with different cloud providers. This can be solved with specific cloud certifications, but in real-world, we cannot pause the business for 6 months until all ops are completely knowledgeable about all inner workings of the currently popular cloud provider.

e) Performance is atrocious at times. That multi-tenancy some guys are mentioning here is for provider's benefit not for the customer. They cram ungodly amount of workload on machines, that mostly works, until it doesn't and when it does not, effects are catastrophic. Yes, you can have isolation and dedicated resources, but a)

f) Security and reliability features are overly exaggerated. From the observable facts, in the last year, we had 4 major incidents lasting several hours strictly related to the platform (total connectivity failure, total service failure, complete loss of one of the sites, etc).

In the end, for anyone who wants to get deeper into this, check what Ahrefs wrote about cloud.

Last occurrence, 6 months or so ago, of that happening was when one of my colleagues discussed vacation in a specific place I absolutely have no interest in visiting, so I was 100% sure I didn't google it or discussed it online. Surprisingly, the next day, I was swamped with booking.com and airbnb deals for stays in that specific area.

I emphasize next day occurrences intentionally, as I am under impression that it takes some time for them to process the data and supply the results to the marketeers.

There is also a difference when using commercial stuff such as vmware instead of qemu or virtualbox as open source is more suitable to be tailored to the specific thing, in this case, cheating.

In the end, this approach works well for slowing done malware as there is less risk for normal software to allow working inside of vm in contrast to malware that should be coded to be extra paranoid in order to avoid as many tar pits as possible.