[abrookewood]

There's one clear cut use case where AWS/Azure are incredibly cheap - Disaster Recovery. At my last job, we maintained a small DB instance and nothing else but an empty VPC. Within 15 minutes, we could spin up the entire DR stack including resizing the DB to support Production. There's no equivalent for this when you ONLY run your own hardware - you're stuck with a second site that sits there idle (unless you intend to do Active-Active which has its own share of problems).