But they generally don't. Most people don't have large enough daily fluctuations for these demand curves to flatten out enough. And the providers also need enough capacity to handle unforeseen spikes. Which is also why none of them will let you scale however far you want - they still impose limits so they can plan the excess they need.

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Havoc 5 days ago | parent [-]

> And the providers also need enough capacity to handle unforeseen spikes.

Indeed but the headroom the cloud needs overall is less than every customers individual worst case scenarios added up. They’d take a percentage of that total because statistically a situation where 100% of customers are at 100% of their peak at 100% same point in time is improbable

Must admit little surprised this logic isn’t self evident

	▲	vidarh 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The logic isn't self evident because it is irrelevant that their total demand doesn't add up this way, because the unit cost of the capacity is higher, and so the cost still ends up being far higher. The unit cost is higher for many reasons, but the two basic ones are margins (exorbitant ones; this is not an efficient market) and that the providers also need to charge for the unused capacity to meet demand from customers behaving in ways they don't on fixed capacity systems, where spreading workloads over time wherever possible tends to become the norm. The demand curves when you're charged for total demand over time rather than peak demand are fundamentally different, and so while you're right the peaks rarely add up in the worst possible way, empirically the peaks end up high enough that cloud compute is expensive even before the exorbitant margins the large cloud providers charge.