We have some DB servers that occasionally need to do very large batches of transactions. They run all month with a couple of CPU's, and a small amount of ram to make sure they are 'caught up' with production, and before the batches are run, get shutdown, and changed to 32 or 64 CPU monsters. An hour or two later, they go back to the 2 cpu servers again. In a non-cloud shop, we would have to size our hardware for that maximum batch size.
