zlacker

>>pul+(OP)
> Vertical scaling — a bigger, exponentially more expensive server

This is in practice not true at all. Vertical scaling is typically a sublinear cost increase (up to a point, but that point is a ridiculous beast of a machine), since you're (typically) upgrading just the CPU and/or just the RAM or just the storage; not all of them at once.

There are instances where you can get nearly 10x the machine for 2x the cost.

>>margin+lu
Also beyond a certain point, it makes sense to go straight to dedicated bare metal. The AWS tax is not worth paying if your workload is mostly fixed, somewhat fault tolerant (i.e. failed hardware on the weekends can be replaced on Monday without major interruption to business operations), and CPU bound. Get a high end machine on Hetzner and put everything behind a VPN or API auth and you will save more than 50% in spending.

>>KRAKRI+1e1
I haven't found this to be true generally unless your workloads are truly completely static, which I've never actually experienced.

Given what engineers at this level cost, their costs per hour dealing with all of the nonsense clouds handle for you (networking, storage, elastic scaling, instant replacement of faulty servers, load balancing, yadda yadda) end up being higher than whatever tax you're paying for using the cloud.

Economies of scale are real.