[Alupis]

Great points, but also consider for medium and small (and large) businesses, being able to provision and pay for only what they need today is often cheaper than spec'ing out beefy hardware to handle tomorrow's scaling issues.

After all, most companies using the "cloud" still have on-staff IT anyway, since non-technical people still cannot manage AWS or any other cloud provider on their own.

Cash flow is another thing - lay out big money for redundant on-site servers and supporting hardware today, or pay as you go and use the cloud. Even if the cloud is ultimately more expensive, it's easier for C-suite folks to plan for a small monthly expense vs. huge up front expenses and then dealing with failures and upgrades, etc.

[chii]

> pay for only what they need today is often cheaper than spec'ing out beefy hardware to handle tomorrow's scaling issues....plan for a small monthly expense vs. huge up front expenses

this is probably the biggest "value" in cloud infrastructure. Capital expenditure is difficult to obtain, but debt is both easier to obtain (esp. in such low interest rate environment of today), plus debt is tax deductible immediately, while capital expenditure is at most a depreciation over the expected lifetime of the hardware.

[tw04]

> Great points, but also consider for medium and small (and large) businesses, being able to provision and pay for only what they need today is often cheaper than spec'ing out beefy hardware to handle tomorrow's scaling issues.

Pretty much every major vendor has or is building an as-a-service play so that you don't have to buy today for 3 years from now. Imperfect for sure, but getting there.