For the majority of use cases, involving relatively static workloads, the cloud doesn't offer many financial benefits, as you say, particularly if you have acce

For the majority of use cases, involving relatively static workloads, the cloud doesn't offer many financial benefits, as you say, particularly if you have access to a competent infrastructure engineer (which are harder to find than you'd think). My experience of cloud has generally been around gambling websites, which have a very distinctive use case pattern, with daily peaks and troughs as well as seasonal peaks and troughs. There can be as much as a 25x difference in throughput between these occasions. For these sites it's a case of implement scaling natively in the cloud and stop worrying about capacity forecasting or invest millions in infrastructure upfront and watch it idle 90% of the time. The financials simply work in this field, as I'd guess they do in serious online retailers with seasonal demand. However your average 2 web server, load balancer and single db server, not so much.