[dna_polymerase]

Of course, if you need only one machine the cloud is probably not for you. If however you can make use of all the hosted options (CloudSQL, Pub/Sub, ML, etc.) and need scalability (in terms of number of machines used) these services are actually useful.

Example, say you run an online shop that has more demand in certain timeframes (like black-friday or December) you can easily scale your website by spinning up machines, which you can easily stop using after the demand flats out. With own hardware/colo/traditional web hosting you can't do that and holding like 10x hardware for short-term traffic spikes makes no sense.

[hgjbhujxgjbv]

The only thing that is a problem is that one physical machine can still handle 10 times the spike of "vcpu" which is shared between multiple customers. For much lower price. Very strong computers are available for real bargain but nooo, lets use the cloud. Its a buzzword so it needs to be good

It is funny that no one used the most realistic "excuse". That you just have no clue how to do it (install, setup software) and as you cant do it yourself, you need to hire someone. This is the only case where google does make sense. It is path into idiocracy as you will be able to do less and less yoursel with outsourcing know-how (we didnt learn anything from past China expiriences right?), but we wont worry too much about it too much about it, untill then you will all be zillionaires and it will no longer matter.

[dna_polymerase]

The online shop was an easy enough example. I could have talked about research projects using thousands of machines for a few hours per experiment. Maybe you understand that holding thousands of machines for effectively using them once in a while doesn't make much sense.

But hey, being judgmental towards a whole industry running large portions of the web is way more fun.