[andreimackenzie]

I completely agree that some types of changes are much more expensive with a bare metal architecture than with cloud.

6 years ago, I worked for a company in the mobile space. This was around the time of the Candy Crush boom, and our traffic and processing/storage needs doubled roughly every six months. Our primary data center was rented space co-located near our urban office. For a while, our sysadmins could simply drive over and rack more servers. We reached a point where our cages were full, and the data center was not willing rent us adjacent space. We were now looking at a very large project to stand up additional capacity elsewhere to augment what we had (with pretty serious implications on the architecture of the whole system beyond the hardware) or move the whole operation to a larger space.

This problem ended up hamstringing the business for many months, as many of our decisions were affected by concern about hitting the scale ceiling. We also devoted significant engineering/sysadmin resources to dealing with this problem instead of building new features to grow the business. If the company had chosen a cloud provider or even VPS, it would have been less critical to try to guess how much capacity we'd need a few years down the road to avoid the physical ceiling we dealt with.

[krab]

Yes, the cloud premium is also a kind of insurance - you know you'll probably be able to double your capacity anytime you need it.