And yet, very rational people, with full understanding of the costs of both environments, and pretty detailed spreadsheets (I've spoken with them) continue to b

And yet, very rational people, with full understanding of the costs of both environments, and pretty detailed spreadsheets (I've spoken with them) continue to buy into PaaS/IaaS offerings aggressively. For the most part, it's because the cost of hardware isn't the only factor, but the flexibility, ability to rapidly scale (and descale), and, most importantly, the fact that Amazon takes care of all the dirty network engineering/system administration work required to keep the plumbing working. But, hey, that's the great thing about the free market - every company/individual gets to make the choices that are most advantageous for themselves. I wouldn't be surprised that in regions where network engineers/sysadmins make less than $125-$150K/year, and there isn't a need to turn up a dozen servers overnight, (and, turn them off the night after that) - that AWS/Azure/GCS isn't attractive. But, clearly, for others, it is.