> 37Signals insists; a large team spent a lot of time doing the smartest deals they could.
I hope this large team was doing other work as well... as they aren't cost-free are they.
Often these problems with cloud cone down to "lifting and shifting" an on-prem (or colo) solution directly into apparently corresponding/equivalent AWS services. But that's not taking advantage of the modern cloud (although it's all you could do 10 to 15 years ago) in all its automated, serverless (sic) glory. For me a bit of a warning sign is when someone's cloud revolves around some unwieldy k8s setup for example.
Cloud isn't going to be for everyone I suppose, but when it's done right it's amazing value for money. You've got to have quite a different mindset about it. Not "what if we put this server on EC2, can we save some £?", but rather, "what is the business need that this server meets, is the process what we need today, and can we model a better process around microservices?"
A great advantage of cloud-done-well is that you can reshape your systems around changing business needs (including unexpected ones) much faster than investing in tin and buildings. That is, so long as you didn't just build a copy of your racks in k8s and stick that on AWS.
To take a slight issue with this article's main analogy, you don't really need to be a brilliant forecaster, because taking advantage of cloud means you can (or should be able to) respond to changing weather very rapidly.