Any use case that has A) a user base with usage that varies significantly over time and B) an architecture that can actually scale significantly up and down

Any use case that has A) a user base with usage that varies significantly over time and B) an architecture that can actually scale significantly up and down during the same time period So if you have lots of web back ends and business logic and general workers for jobs that can just be shut down when there's no capacity needed, there's a ton of savings available in the cloud. If you have a big monolithic architecture or some other organization where everything is just on all the time, the cloud makes less sense as a cost savings. I once wrote an internal chat bot which was used less than 2 seconds per day, but was actually supremely useful as it really simplified some process or another and took a fraction of a second to run each time. The actual cost to run this in the cloud was approximately 1 cent per year. If I didn't have this cloud capability it would be hundreds of dollars per year to host or thousands of capital in machines and maintenance to host myself.