> I agree with everything you say - I'm convinced that a huge part of the cloud's financial success is due to how it allows CTOs/CIOs to indulge their fantasies

> I agree with everything you say - I'm convinced that a huge part of the cloud's financial success is due to how it allows CTOs/CIOs to indulge their fantasies about having a mega-scalable app - even if their workloads are very regular and predictable. It's a sane choice given incentives, too. Cloud bullshit features prominently on an awful lot of technical job postings these days. But yeah I've definitely seen some heavy, expensive cloud setups that could have run on a toaster. Smaller-scale B2B stuff seems especially prone to this—like, what's your max reasonable traffic? If you took off like crazy? What's the size of your market? Come on. Throw in really half-assed and inconsistent use of automation tools and lots of relying on shitty cloud web dashboards and hope, and often the toaster (or a couple low-end co-located servers, more seriously) would be easier and safer to manage, too.