It really depends on workloads. Imagine you need massive spikes of compute for, say, flash sales, or people watching the superbowl in your streaming service. Bu

It really depends on workloads. Imagine you need massive spikes of compute for, say, flash sales, or people watching the superbowl in your streaming service. Buying all that hardware for just the spikes might not make sense vs just scaling up vms in a cloud provider and scale them down. In the real world, for baseline load, the big advantage for many large companies isn't price, but the massive lack of alacrity of many inhouse ops teams. If it takes me 3+ months to provision compute for the simplest, lowest demand services (as is the custom in many large companies full of red tape and arguments about who bears costs), letting teams just spin up anything they want and get billed directly is often a winner, even if it's more expensive. Having entire teams waste months before they can put something in prod is a very different kind of expense in itself.