> having to provision for peak load is not cost effective. That is true, if peak load is much much higher than mean load. For most companies, that's not the c

> having to provision for peak load is not cost effective. That is true, if peak load is much much higher than mean load. For most companies, that's not the case. On the cloud you are overpaying for cpu, network and storage by a very wide margin. That makes sense if your peak load is, say, 100x your mean load (and you have sufficienly smart autoscaling to optimize for this). But for most companies there is not such huge multiplier from mean usage to peak usage. So those are better off with owning hardware.