My suggestion to you, then, is this: instead of making blanket statements and allowing for a teeny-tiny exception for edge case, try to remember that the market

My suggestion to you, then, is this: instead of making blanket statements and allowing for a teeny-tiny exception for edge case, try to remember that the market is FULL of those edge cases. Almost the entire education market, billions of dollars of revenue, fits into what you described as "exceptionally bursty" and didn't even include in your first blanket dismissal. I suspect education isn't the only market that surprises you with its burstiness. We frequently see links at HN that fall over and die after they're linked. On the one hand, that's usually because they've misconfigured a personal blog and lack caching. On the other hand, some services just weren't ready for HN traffic and failed to scale up. Which.... they wouldn't, were they running on a cloud provider like AWS. It's possible for any service to be surprisingly bursty, but I suspect more than you think are bursty on a regular basis. P.S. DO Droplets are Digital Ocean's response to AWS Lambda, and are still "cloud."