The fact that not even the largest and most compute-intensive software companies manage their own servers now should really end the cloud computing cost argument at his point.
Netflix has long been open about the fact that their costs for content dwarf their IT costs, and encoding is a bursty CPU demand that perfectly fits cloud economics.
Note I'm not including their networking costs to get to the last mile, where they place a lot of their own boxes in ISP facilities pretty close to users, that would be about the same however they were doing core IT.
IME cloud _can_ easily be more expensive and more work than bare metal, in house or colocated. If course it depends upon the workload and the tools/resources available to manage it. Even with clouds there is still server management to do.
More expensive - maybe, depending on how good you are at managing runaway costs.
More work - definitely not. No matter how hard managing your AWS workflows is, bare metal will always be all that same work plus everything else related to hardware, cooling, power management, ISP and more.
