The best part about the cloud for me is that it scales down to ZERO. We used to get large on-prem servers that could handle the worst case, only for them to sit idle 90% of the time. Now we just spin up the 5-10 EC2s we need a couple days a week when we receive new data.
I keep hearing the same, but truthfully I have never seen someone scale to zero. Usually it's only a single component of the architecture that does (if any).
But;
A) You have to engineer your system to scale to zero, engineering time isn't free
B) The overhead cost of service (5x for Linux compute, 11x for Windows compute, 7x for managed DB -- based on my last reads) can easily swallow any savings, especially if you're not scaled to zero almost all the time.
It only takes about 8hrs of being "non-zero" and it would have been cheaper just to have a whole machine for a day somewhere that wasn't a hyperscaler cloud provider.
Yeah 8 hours would be quite a bit for a day. I'll tell you our use case. We receive a large dump of data 2 times a week, and we spin up 5 machines to process the data files. We have one machine that uses a GPU, one that needs like 128GB of RAM, and a few smaller ones. They're up for maybe 3 hours each.
