I just want to clarify that when I said "per-minute" billing, I really mean consumption based billing, or OpEx vs. CapEx if you prefer. The interval isn't that important although the smaller the interval, the greater the agility. Case in point, I needed to test out something on a sharepoint server farm the other day, just a simple POC. I spun it up in Azure from a template, did my quick test in about 3 hours, then destroyed it. Cost was probably around $10? If it was Monthly, then it would have probably cost $400+ (I'm estimating because I didn't actually look it up).

The second scenario is relevant to cloud because, as I said you don't have to do any capacity planning. Just pick a VM size and go. If you need more or less, just change the size up or down at any time. With monitoring and scheduling you can dynamically increase and decrease the VM size (and cost) any time. So for example, your main application server could be "beefy" 9-5, then scaled to "small" after hours (or even powered off completely). Or seasonally, during year end, scale up, after that, scale down.

Regarding horses vs. trucks; I agree with your points exactly. a) there will always be use cases for on-prem (horses), b) is an example of point (a), c) I agree, as I said it will take time to transition and horses will be around for a long time to come, never the less, trucks will inevitably replace (almost) all horses. d) Once you've proven the business case for trucks, then (d) is actually an argument for transitioning faster. The quicker you get rid of the horses, the better the business case.

I'm sorry Adam but I have to completely disagree with your "we have not made any progress since the mainframe days" rant. There isn't a single industry that isn't massively more productive today than it was in the 80s and that can be attributed almost entirely to computers and automation. The systems today are many many times more complex than they were in the terminal days and yet deliver massively more value.

Furthermore; "Cloud" is proven. It's not just a fad. As I said, it doesn't meet every business case today, but as the economies of Cloud improve (it keeps getting cheaper), it will expand and inevitably take over as the dominant way to deliver compute.

Side note; I happen to own 2 horses AND a truck! lol

John