I've always thought cloud costs have been excessive profit centers, and this goes back to before it was called cloud with "ASPs" in regulated industries produc

I've always thought cloud costs have been excessive profit centers, and this goes back to before it was called cloud with "ASPs" in regulated industries product offerings. Early days I remember looking at Cloud vendors that were offering FISMA virtualization capabilities and I did an analysis of alternatives around running a set amount of CPUs, RAM, i/o and disk to support VMs. Terremark was the first offering that could meet our reqs, at around 10k a month per for a server's equivalent capability. This put in my mind from day one that I was trading off High Capex with low Opex, for No Capex and High Opex. Given our trades, it was clear that high Capex was preferable to high Opex, as our high capex would have been equal to one month's opex. When we later on saw more mainstream vendors like Amazon move into the space, their offerings were also coming with insane overhead, $2000 a month automatic surcharges for a FISMA regulated environment.