If you care mostly about reads, the above setup can be operationally simpler and likely more cost effective and agnostic than a full suite of Cloud products.
Yes, depends on the product that is being built and the traffic it is going to server. In case it's not a high traffic website, we can definitely bypass Cloud. In my stint at a startup, we were directly serving the content via Nginx instead of CDN. Our scope was limited to only country and the use case was also simple, just to display a transaction page with few images to the customers.
