It really depends. If you're doing a "lift and shift" then running stuff in the cloud is almost certainly going to be more expensive. However if you migrate t

It really depends. If you're doing a "lift and shift" then running stuff in the cloud is almost certainly going to be more expensive. However if you migrate to using managed services then there can be a lot of cost savings. To be honest it's a lot like the old days of PHP hosts - comparing VPS to shared hosting - except it's now the shared hosting is scaled up and "enterprisey". What I do find most people overlook when saying "the cloud is cheap" is just how much time is required to deploy to the cloud. I don't mean POCing a few things in the AWS console but rather deploying stuff properly using Terraform, Puppet, etc and architecting it correctly so you have resilience without paying through the nose for it.