Many of the stories here are from large companies, where the costs are quite a different beast. I want to offer an opposite view - from a small company (20-30 p

Many of the stories here are from large companies, where the costs are quite a different beast. I want to offer an opposite view - from a small company (20-30 people), which is usually the kind of company best suited for the cloud. We ran a number of modelling jobs, basically CPU intensive tasks that would run for minutes to hours. Investing in on-prem computers (mostly workstations, some servers), we got very solid performance, very predictable costs and no ops issues. Renting beefy machines in the cloud is very expensive and unless you get crafty (spot and/or intelligent deployment), it will be prohibitive for many. Looking at AMD's offering these days, you can get sustained on-prem perf for a few dollars. Three details of note: 1) We didn't need bursty perf (very infrequently) - had this been a need, the cloud would make a lot more sense, at least in a hybrid deployment. 2) we didn't do much networking (I'm in a different company now and we work with a lot of storage on S3 and on-prem wouldn't be feasible for us), 3) we didn't need to work remotely much, it was all at the office. Obviously, it was a very specific scenario, but given how small the company was, we couldn't afford people to manage the whole cloud deployment/security/scaling etc. and beefy workstations was a much simpler and more affordable endeavour.