As someone who does DevOps for a living, The scaling options are really what make cloud semi-affordable and useful for enterprises. Not to mention the “I don’t have to waste engineers doing menial upkeep” (aka, managed services means there’s a good amount of “not my problem”). The other part that’s a huge savings is being able to use things like terraform or pulumi to quickly deploy, destroy and redeploy for test environments and dr.

I can completely redeploy an enterprise scale website in hours, code and data deployments included.

Things are crazy busy because you ran a sale or ad during the superbowl, scale it all up in seconds. Want to test something or run a dev environment that people don’t use regularly? Only spin it up when they need it.

We power down all dev and test environments every night and weekend. Some only spin up on demand. Saves tons on capital and nominal run rate.