[oceanplexian]

> Without a cloud you’re always running up against limits, out of power, out out cooling, out of rack space, out of hardware.

I grew up in this era and keep hearing this repeated but it simply wasn’t true. Enterprises would plan ahead and buy enough hardware for years and it would work fine until you bought more. The myth that you need to scale your infrastructure 10x in a day doesn’t apply to 99% of enterprises, and even if it did it’s probably a result of bad planning on the part of leadership. As a result of the current paradigm businesses end up renting servers at a substantial markup for fairly obsolete hardware.

[zrm]

In general it's really the opposite. In 2004 you needed a rack full of $3000 servers to run your medium business. Now it's two physical machines using 5% of the power to virtualize everything that used to run on two dozen.

Over a given period of time, computers get faster/cheaper by more than most businesses expand. When you need to expand, buying a newer, faster machine may cause you to save money because the faster machine uses less power than the existing one.