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The speed of light is not your friend. You can never compete with the latency of a local network versus even the fastest connection to a cloud provider.

Yeah, that (worker nodes, async processing, etc) seems like one of those ideal use-case for clouds that I could definitely support as a viable option for companies that aren't ready for all-in cloud deployment.

Cpu also generally sucks due to cache thrashing on non-trivial datasets

Heh. So what is a good use case for EC2?

When you have highly variable load.

eg. Netflix probably spins up thousands of servers for a few hours.