I think homelabbing is still alive and well. Biggest issue i'v faced is how ISP's can basically limit your options. Without access to highspeed fiber 10G or higher, it can limit what your doing.

Does everyone need fiber in their lab, no they don't. But its frustrating when your entire state has basically no options for 10gig symmetrical fiber, and your only alternative is to either move or somehow spend tons of money and start your own fiber ISP which isn't feasible for most.

It's just becoming more specialized. You can still run bare-metal servers if you want, either colocating them or else running unmanaged VMs (or yes, hosting it on your own infra if your company is big enough). And of course there are entire companies dedicated to hosting global infra for other companies, so if that's the part of the stack you like, working at one of those will get you a lot of exposure to "running your own servers".

But for smaller or medium sizes businesses, that part of it adds no business value and it's easier to just outsource it to the cloud, the same way that wouldn't necessarily want to build & maintain their own cars or laptops or electricity grid.

When you can trivially host a small to medium scale website on managed infra from free to like $20/mo, it doesn't make sense to manage it yourself. Even a regular package or OS update will cost you more than that just in labor.

Ain't nobody got time for all that.

If the big players would stick to the RFC's it wouldn't be a problem.

Nope. Local hosted servers are common af around here. It'd just all nucs now instead of chunky boi hp workstations.

Need backup of your data? Couple of nucs with external hdds. One at site, one at business owners home. Way cheaper than ongoing cloud costs for a few tb. And business owners like one off costs not ongoing overheads. One off cost is a easy asset write off they think about once not an ongoing monthly fee that jacks up their baseline and can change at anytime. No service provider lockin, data storage is mostly dumb compute, so set and forget.

You might not consider it best practice...but it is the way amongst smbs. Why pay a monthly fee to some msp who stings you out the wazoo when you can slap down a single setup fee for 1/5th their annual cost if a msp were to do it?

The same is starting to happen to local llms. Company of 50 people? You wanna drop a grand a month on openai(12k a year?) Have no control of ya data and not be able to train on local files? Or drop 4k to 6k on a machine and 2k on a tech to come and do some maintenance quarterly?

Clouds cool if you don't mind throwing money in the bin but it's overpriced for alotta smbs. Turns out your one warehouse and office doesn't need multiple high availability clusters scattered across the country...it just needs 3,2 1 backup.