[prewett]

A surprise massive bill can be worse than no solution at all, in my opinion. And if the easy path leads to massive-bill lock-in, that's also not very helpful. It's not like people didn't know how to run servers and remote storage before AWS showed up. Before AWS showed up at least your data-center costs were pretty predictable: you managed the servers yourself, so whatever the salaries summed to, that was it. It's not like poor programming ate up your years' IT budget by May.

[tekknik]

But you did waste money through capacity planning. As you either have the exact quantity of servers needed, or you have some sitting there idle. Then there’s swapping out older/failing hardware. In fact your DC calculations are rather difficult to get accurate.