Snap was spending 2B over 5 years - so 400M/yr. By comparison, Uber, who operates under managed colo, spends nearly 200M/yr alone on real estate for their datacenters. Who knows how much they are paying in engineering salaries so manage those datacenters.
Personally I don't think there's a one size fits all solution, you will have to do the math (like I'm sure Snap, Netflix and others have done) to see if cloud is worth it. However, I agree, for most teams the default should be cloud.
Personally I don't think there's a one size fits all solution, you will have to do the math (like I'm sure Snap, Netflix and others have done) to see if cloud is worth it. However, I agree, for most teams the default should be cloud.