I can snapshot a database disk with a click of a button and restore the snapshot with yet another few clicks.
I have 1.5 TB of highly available disk space, 40 cores of full CPU power, 160 GB of RAM, & dynamically provisioned IPs for metallb. For only $130USD a month. For the same price in Azure, I had 6 CPU cores & 8 GB RAM.
But let's say need 4x vCPU: 72, Memory (GiB): 144 for 4 hours. Or you need that 12 hours a day but for the rest of the time you need 2 cpu and 4 GiB of memory.
You need to handle traffic spikes such as TV traffic.
Yes you could self-host a cloud env but you can't scale your resources the way you can with cloud.
And that is literally the largest AWS Elasticsearch cluster option. So clearly that will be deployed for multiple orginsations. Otherwise they wouldn't have created a default node that size.
I would probably send you back to where ever you came from and tell you to re-engineer that. Cloud or no cloud.
Sometimes you need to spend lots of money on tech debt. I think it's nuts that was required but it was.
I wish they’d bring those same prices to some US data centers.
For companies the benefits are the abiltiy to get new servers at a click of a button and get rid of a server. For example, asking the ops team to setup a snapshot of a database for a few hours while I do something is super useful.
There is also the ability to use autoscale and other stuff to automagically scale your system to handle traffic peaks. With dedcicated servers you need to always have those resources available. It's attractive to managers that they're only paying for resources when they're using it.
There are also managed services like DynamoDb, Lambda, S3, etc that can make things easier and reduce your sysadmin work. And allow you to get up and running very quickly.
Obivously, a major downside is that the pricing is extremely vulnerable to spikes like this. I think we see an article like this every 3 months or so. This one is rather tame compared to some others that were 10x as much for a 24-hour period.