[thayne]

well, kind of. I think it is pretty common to have a base amount of compute you need, but still need the flexibility to elastically scale up when required. So real workloads are generally a mix of elastic and reserved rates. But how much of each really depends on the workload, so cockroachdb did the easy thing, and just compared the on-demand prices.

Also, there are a lot of things that the big cloud providers manage for you. I haven't dealt with DC managed-hardware, but I imagine that you probably have to do a lot more to set up networking, provision VMs on raw hardware, etc.