I understand, I just wanted to express how I think it's really specific to to the task at hand (and vent a little about annoyances of the past). CPU intensive

I understand, I just wanted to express how I think it's really specific to to the task at hand (and vent a little about annoyances of the past). CPU intensive and or GPU might be a bad case, but it also depends on how actively you utilize the systems. For some of my stuff, I have what's likely close to an ideal case, where systems are only needed for about 5 continuous hours each day, Monday through Friday. I can turn them up on start or work, and off 5 hours later, and pay a fraction the cost for a full time deployment in the cloud since other than disk I only pay for the compute used. > it totals up to $40K a month Yeah, it sounds like your use case is bad for cloud (not that I'm an expert), especially if you're able to get that all in one rack. It's a lot more useful if you have different layers that may need to grow at different speeds. For example, a front-end load balancing set of systems, a group of web servers to aggregate some back-end services for page display, different service clusters, and a set of databases (read-only replicas and master-master replication, etc). Both being able to scale some systems vertically (just allocate more RAM and/ro CPU to it) and other horizontally (just add more servers to a load balanced set) can be extremely useful, especially when the unexpected hits and you find you load is multiple times the normal amount all of a sudden and you need to provision now.