[pm7]

> Hmm. I read the comment as saying “no cloud, because you’ll save so much by just being on-prem”. And I think an “apples-to-apples” comparison requires an N+1 setup including both compute and networking.

That is valid interpretation. I just wanted to say that is you need high availability it might be cheaper to have one colocation and cloud in standby.

> Hybrid could be many different setups, but before their “zonal affinity” change it would actually be worse, right? (Egress over Direct Connect is 4x higher than Zone to Zone, while “internet” egress is 8x).

Yes, in/out traffic would be one of more problematic points of such setup, but there should be some solutions available (BGP?).

> What are you assuming for the balance of Compute and Networking across at least three “sites”?

Least expensive should be zero compute in cloud unless there is issue with collocation. Depending on specific scenario, some storage/databases would have replication to cloud. I don't know how I would setup networking in such case.

[pm7]

> Least expensive should be zero compute in cloud unless there is issue with collocation.

One more thing: cloud can be great to scale up in peak utility without buying servers that will idle most of the time. It's just that using only cloud might be much more costly, even if it is easier.