[mikestew]

There have been articles posted here on HN about companies that moved to the cloud for savings, grew their business, and eventually left their cloud provider due to high costs.

I've never been in a position to find out the hard way, but that's how "the cloud" always struck me. "Have access to the computing power of a multimillion dollar mainframe w/o buying the mainframe!" But if/when you actually need and can afford a multimillion dollar mainframe (or equivalent), cloud pricing might not be much savings.