> if someone asked you tomorrow to scale 100x you likely could during the workday.

I've never seen a cloud setup where that was true.

For starters: Most cloud providers will impose limits on you that often means going 100x would involve pleading with account managers to have limits lifted and/or scrounding a new, previously untested, combination of instance sizes.

But secondly, you'll tend to run into unknown bottlenecks long before that.

And so, in fact, if that is a thing you actually want to be able to do, you need to actually test it.

But it's also generally not a real problem. I more often come across the opposite: Customers who've gotten hit with a crazy bill because of a problem rather than real use.

But it's also easy enough to set up a hybrid setup that will spin up cloud instances if/when you have a genuine need to be able to scale up faster than you can provision new bare metal instances. You'll typically run an orchestrator and run everything in containers on a bare metal setup too, so typically it only requires having an auto-scaling group scaled down to 0, and warm it up if load nears critical level on your bare metal environment, and then flip a switch in your load balancer to start directing traffic there. It's not a complicated thing to do.

Now, incidentally, your bare metal setup is even cheaper because you can get away with a higher load factor when you can scale into cloud to take spikes.

> And generally speaking if your problem is at a scale where baremetal is trivial to implement, its likely we're only taking about a few hundred dollars a month being 'wasted' in AWS. Which is nothing to most companies, especially when they'd have to consider developer/devops time.

Generally speaking, I only relatively rarely work on systems that cost less than in the tens of thousands per month and up, and what I consistently see with my customers is that the higher the cost, the bigger the bare-metal advantage tends to be as it allows you to readily amortise initial setup costs of more streamlined/advanced setups. The few places where cloud wins on cost is the very smallest systems, typically <$5k/month.