[geofft]

Nothing is stopping you from applying all those optimizations to on-premise hardware, right?

That is, I am not sure "public cloud, if you spend lots of effort to optimize it and ask devs to be careful, can be as cheap as a naive on-prem implementation where devs don't need to be careful" is an argument for public cloud.

[philliphaydon]

Well if your on prem then you’re probably bit more limited in what you can do. You can’t just go “let’s solve this with x” cos x doesn’t exist so you need to prevision it yourself and maintain it yourself. It’s probably better cos you actually need to think about what you’re building rather than just throwing services left and right at the problems.

I’m also not suggesting optimising and being careful is an argument for cloud. I’m saying that ruling out cloud is stupid. You can absolute have a Low cost solution perform very well on a cloud provider. The OP seems to think it’s not possible.