Absorbing peak traffic was the original selling point of the &quot;elastic&quot; cloud. Sure, the cloud was more expensive, but you only had to pay for it for a few hours while traffic peaked. If traffic peaked multiple days in a row, then maybe it was time to rent a new dedicated server.<p>This is still the most economically sensible infrastructure strategy. Maintain a core group of dedicated servers responsible for a threshold workload. When they can no longer handle all incoming work, they offload the excess to temporarily provisioned cloud workers.<p>The benefits:<p>- Guarantee you are only getting price gouged by Amazon for a subset of your traffic<p>- Force yourself to build software that runs on multiple platforms<p>- Address scaling requirements up front<p>Perhaps most importantly, this strategy creates a profit incentive for increasing compute efficiency, regardless of Amazon&#x27;s pricing structure. Every increase in software efficiency means that the same group of core servers can serve more requests, so you can pay less to Amazon.