I've made just the opposite argument. If you give me three weeks and a few EC2 instances,I can set up an integration environment that runs some automated test and we can cut the amount we spend on QA by x%.

Small tip from an ex-QAer: Don't worry, once the easy cases are automated, they'll have plenty of work to still do. At least the good ones will. They'll start doing more extreme exploratory testing, setting up combinatorial testing, fuzz testing...

A good QA analyst is like any other good employee - they always have something else they'd like to test.

We are real QA heavy right now with non FTEs. I'm not saying they don't bring value, but the types of things they are QAing now is both new functionality and regression testing. I can't think of any good reason that regression testing shouldn't be completely automated.

Yes, nowadays it is very easy to end up with zillions of VMs (and services) running in the cloud without a little organized plan. In the recent past you should trigger purchase orders to buy hardware. Not saying that the past was better but flexibility has a high price without coordination. Imagine thousands of developers launching new VMs with a single click.

If your AWS or Asure bill is a problem you need to think about going back to on prem or private cloud.