Clowd was never cheap; it was versatile, and it still is.
Just, please, get over this ‘cheap’ fallacy. It’s expensive as shit, either in direct costs or the labour required to min-max for savings. If you’re not regularly bulldozing a massive portion of your stuff or running in two regions for resilience, then you should just look at another idea – and Don’t say Azure, as there’s a reason we call that cheap hot-garbage ‘unsure’.
Wait until you need to validate the installed state of files on the machine. You’ll reconsider Debian like many security people do.