Avoiding upfront costs helps lengthening the startup's runway, even if total cost until time=infinity is higher. Building fault-tolerance (like S3/EBS do) is a

Avoiding upfront costs helps lengthening the startup's runway, even if total cost until time=infinity is higher. Building fault-tolerance (like S3/EBS do) is a HARD problem. That's worth paying for. Once you move your data to the cloud for reliability, you almost have to move the processing close to the data to get acceptable performance.