That so many people remember bare metal as of 20+ years ago is a large part of the problem.
A modern server can be power cycled remotely, can be reinstalled remotely over networked media, can have its console streamed remotely, can have fans etc. checked remotely without access to the OS it's running etc. It's not very different from managing a cloud - any reasonable server hardware has management boards. Even if you rent space in a colo, most of the time you don't need to set foot there other than for an initial setup (and you can rent people to do that too).
But for most people, bare metal will tend to mean renting bare metal servers already configured anyway.
When the first thing you then tend to do is to deploy a container runtime and an orchestrator, you're effectively usually left with something more or less (depending on your needs) like a private cloud.
As for "buying ahead of time", most managed server providers and some colo operators also offer cloud services, so that even if you don't want to deal with a multi-provider setup, you can still generally scale into cloud instances as needed if your provider can't bring new hardware up fast enough (but many managed server providers can do that in less than a day too).
I never think about buying ahead of time. It hasn't been a thing I've had to worry about for a decade or more.
> A modern server can be power cycled remotely, can be reinstalled remotely over networked media, can have its console streamed remotely, can have fans etc. checked remotely without access to the OS it's running etc. It's not very different from managing a cloud - any reasonable server hardware has management boards. Even if you rent space in a colo, most of the time you don't need to set foot there other than for an initial setup (and you can rent people to do that too).
All of this was already possible 20 years ago, with iLO and DRAC cards.
Yes, that's true, but 20 years ago a large proportion of lower end servers people were familiar with didn't have anything like it, and so a whole lot even of developers who remember "pre-cloud" servers have never experienced servers with them.
You are right but I just think people miss the history when we talk about moving to the cloud. It was not that long ago at a reasonable size Bay Area company, I would need to justify new metal to be provisioned to standup a service I was tasked with.