The Amazon Premium
I often see these comparisons done to try to discredit the use of cloud computing resources, often comparing single cloud entities to bare metal one-for-one comparisons.<p>But that's now how compute is delivered in projects any more.  The value isn't on the box, it's on <i>the platform</i>.<p>I'm personally about to bolt together a solution that will need to scale significantly, that uses complex message queuing, enormous amounts of object storage, expose set of APIs, and require a highly available distributed document store.  And I'm going to personally do it <i>by myself</i> without having to hire 14 SMEs across each of the domains.<p>The value isn't in a cheaper linux server, or less expensive bandwidth.  The value is me being able to develop a solution from the ground up by bolting together Web services, Amazon S3, SNS/SQS, Lambda and DynamoDB from a menu of integrated services all by myself. Period.