Summary
It is safe to say that larger cloud providers are likely to experience economies of scale, as well as other advantages such as denial-of-service attack resilience and exceeding the minimum scale required for certain functions. Whether these economies of scale translate into a cost advantage relative to do-it-yourself approaches is difficult to determine due to all of the cost drivers involved, and is also dependent on application workload profiles and other factors.
As we’ll see in more depth in the next chapter, however, regardless of whether the unit cost of doing IT yourself is higher or lower than the price offered by service providers that can leverage economies of scale, the cloud should almost always be a part of your overall IT architecture and strategy, even ignoring other benefits of cloud usage such as user quality of experience.
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