> if one thinks critically, the only time renting can be cheaper than owning is if it's short-term. If you skip economies of scale that is. AWS, Azure and GCP

> if one thinks critically, the only time renting can be cheaper than owning is if it's short-term. If you skip economies of scale that is. AWS, Azure and GCP allow you to use stuff that has cost billions of man hours and matériel to develop and deploy. How much would it cost you to build a global network? A globally distributed DB? Custom ARM/Tensor chips which come out much cheaper than mainstream alternatives for some workloads? If all you need is to host a few apps in a narrow geographic area, or do compute/graphics intensive stuff on an inflexible scale, it will probably cost less over a long period of time (3-5 years). But it's still much more inflexible, time consuming and hard. You need to hire the right people and they need the time to order, configure and deploy all that infrastructure.