I think the comment does ring true in many cases however, where a minimal infrastructure is more than sufficient. We recently received notice that an EC2 instance was being retired and we needed to relaunch. It had no load balancing; it was just an m1.medium with a standard Java app on Ubuntu, with a static IP address, and it ran for like 5 years. No elasticity etc. Essentially 1:1 for a standard "old school" setup.