That’s because architecting stuff for the cloud effectively means you’re building your infrastructure differently to how you’d run dedicated servers. I say this as someone who’s done both professionally.

As a DevOps hiring manager, if you said to me “I don’t have cloud experience but I can do all the same things with dedicated servers” then I’d likely pass on you for another candidate too.

A better way to frame your applications is “I have significant on prem experience using DevOps methodologies, and I’m excited to broaden them with Cloud technologies.” That way you’re acknowledging your knowledge gap and turning it into a positive.