The advantage is rapid burst scaling. Some businesses have workloads that only require a handful of small servers for most of the year, but for short periods of

The advantage is rapid burst scaling. Some businesses have workloads that only require a handful of small servers for most of the year, but for short periods of time require hundreds or even thousands of servers to process sudden workload bursts. Some examples: * e-commerce sites around holidays; ticketing sites right before popular events * internet fora that get sudden influxes of traffic (e.g. Reddit) * scientific computing projects that occasionally require huge batch jobs using (hundreds of) thousands of cores [0] You are correct that for the majority of businesses, whose workload requirements minimally and predictably fluctuate, cloud providers are a rip off. But for the few use cases actually requiring massive transient scaling, there is no viable alternative. [0] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/220000-cores-and-counting-mit-math-professor-breaks-record-for-largest-ever-compute-engine-job https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/220000-cores-and-...