> The whole point of a cloud to a business is that you can adapt to changing needs without having to pay for all the infrastructure all the time.
The point of a cloud is that you can adapt to changing needs by reallocating resources based on demands. For a public cloud, that's exchanging money for more storage/compute capacity/etc. with near-zero latency. For a private cloud, its not adding total capacity, but reallocating between different uses on demand.
Having worked in large organizations still primarily concerned about allocating physical servers to tasks -- which, just like one with a private cloud, still keeps substantial excess capacity to accomodate changing needs --I can immediately see that being able to reallocate resources with minimal latency is valuable even if its from a fixed pool where increasing the total size of the pool has substantial latency.
That's a technical detail, not a financial one. Sure, you can save a few physical servers by being smarter in allocating load, but that is a far cry from the financial flexibility you get from e.g. EC2.
The point of a cloud is that you can adapt to changing needs by reallocating resources based on demands. For a public cloud, that's exchanging money for more storage/compute capacity/etc. with near-zero latency. For a private cloud, its not adding total capacity, but reallocating between different uses on demand.
Having worked in large organizations still primarily concerned about allocating physical servers to tasks -- which, just like one with a private cloud, still keeps substantial excess capacity to accomodate changing needs --I can immediately see that being able to reallocate resources with minimal latency is valuable even if its from a fixed pool where increasing the total size of the pool has substantial latency.