The initial rush for what is now called the public cloud was caused by many factors, the main ones being "you don't need to manage things as we will do it for you" (=you save on operations) and "you can scale up and down how much you want without any commitment" (=you save on recurring costs) with success stories like the NYT resizing tons of images fast without having to rent servers, configure them etc.
Fast forward and what we now have is a terribly complex beast with nets of dependencies that got developed partly by marketing and product teams, partly by demands of larger customers. And it's more or less clear that if you are small, you will be much better off using VPS (that's why Amazon decided to offer Lightsail), and if you are very big, you will save a lot of money moving at least part of your infra away from the public cloud.
But what remains is a large part of the market: medium sized businesses and large organizations that depend on the public cloud for many reasons. But they are not stupid: once a project becomes expensive, someone starts asking questions. And after you've exhausted the path of reserved instances, spot etc., and still burn a lot of money with not-always-stellar performance, you'll find a way of moving these workloads where it makes business sense.
Fast forward and what we now have is a terribly complex beast with nets of dependencies that got developed partly by marketing and product teams, partly by demands of larger customers. And it's more or less clear that if you are small, you will be much better off using VPS (that's why Amazon decided to offer Lightsail), and if you are very big, you will save a lot of money moving at least part of your infra away from the public cloud.
But what remains is a large part of the market: medium sized businesses and large organizations that depend on the public cloud for many reasons. But they are not stupid: once a project becomes expensive, someone starts asking questions. And after you've exhausted the path of reserved instances, spot etc., and still burn a lot of money with not-always-stellar performance, you'll find a way of moving these workloads where it makes business sense.