One FTE that does on-call system engineering is wayyyy more expensive than a fleet of 20 vm's. Not to mention the cost of hardware itself.

I know there's a threshold where the cost benefit works in favor of on prem, but it's nowhere near most 20 node k8s clusters.

> One FTE that does on-call system engineering is wayyyy more expensive than a fleet of 20 vm's. Not to mention the cost of hardware itself.

Note that rented dedicated servers are 20x cheaper. What you're talking about, colocation, is 50x cheaper.

You're not really out of the weeds when it comes to dedicated servers either. You still need an on call resource to manage the software in that scenario.