We spend ~$20,000 per month in AWS for the product I work on. In the average day we do not launch an EC2 instance. We do not do any dynamic scaling. However, there are many scenarios (especially during outages and such) that it would be critical for us to be able to launch a new instance (and or stop/start an existing instance.)
I understand scaling. I’m saying there is a difference in severity of several orders of magnitude between “the computers are down” and “we can’t add additional computers”.
one of the main points of cloud computing is scaling up and down frequently