Use your bare metal for your low-water mark and "scale over" to the cloud. Setting up a hybrid cloud like this is not overly complicated and AWS and other prov

Use your bare metal for your low-water mark and "scale over" to the cloud. Setting up a hybrid cloud like this is not overly complicated and AWS and other providers will offer you a direct connect network connection in many carrier neutral colocation datacenters so you can sit on your cloud vpc with a physical connection in your datacenter of choice. Get the best of both worlds. Providers like ovh can get very close to the cost of buying your own metal with a tco break-even at over 18 months, not counting network and power equipment costs. Using ec2 or GCE for a large number of persistent vms without a heavy discount seems... Wasteful.