[chocolatebunny]

I don't think cost is the benefit of cloud. For tech companies the benefit is scale (you won't know how popular a product is until you deploy). For non-tech companies the benefit is not having to deal with things that aren't related to your core business.

I think you can argue that tech is always related to your core business and you only need a few servers to handle a million simultaneous users but those kinds of arguments aren't usually good enough to businessmen or entrepreneurs.

[ericd]

Yeah, you don't know how big you'll need to scale, but I think that's a bit of a boogeyman for a lot of companies. Servers have a relatively massive amount of cores and memory these days, along with screaming fast IO, and you can handle quite a lot of web traffic with only a few dual socket servers if you don't bog them down with incredibly inefficient code.