Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cloud is about elasticity. At ${work} we spin up a ton of EC2 instances in anticipation of huge traffic spikes that happen predictably several times a day, in different regions, and spin them down afterwards. It's also about simplicity. Many services come pre-configured on.AWS, with clustering, failover, backups, etc already present. When you are small, you can sysadmin your server fine, and you don't yet need the cl…
How much would it cost to handle your peak load with dedicated servers and no scaling?
We'd likely have to have some reserve just in case our marketing and product do so well that the next peak of the load rises higher in absolute terms.