The sad thing: Throwing hardware at a problem was actually cheaper for a long time. You could buy that $1500 CPU and put it in your dedicated server, or spend 40 developer hours at $100 a pop. Obviously I'm talking about after the easy software side optimizations have already been put in (no amount of hardware will save you if you use the wrong data structures).

Nowadays you pay $500 a month for 4 measly CPU cores in Azure. Or "less than 1 core" for an SQL Server.

Obviously you have a lot more scalability and reliability in the cloud. But for $500 a month each we had a 16 core, 512 GB RAM machine in the datacenter (4 of them). That kind of hardware on AWS or Azure would bankrupt most companies in a year.