The original discussion was around price-performance of physical servers vs cloud VMs. That being the case, it's not a clean a distinction as you describe it. I

The original discussion was around price-performance of physical servers vs cloud VMs. That being the case, it's not a clean a distinction as you describe it. It would be more along buying a few trucks and taking them to the garage when needed (which is rare in small numbers) vs renting many more vans, for higher margin, just to avoid the garage.