Crossref, a previous employer, has moved their infrastructure to the cloud. There are some good reasons for this, eg publication metadata depost volume is highly variable and being able to add capacity on short notice is good. But others not so much, eg search does grow but slowly over long periods where normal hardware purchasing can occur. (This may have changed since I was employeed.) What shocked me was the cost:
Moving from a physical data centre to the cloud also has some trade-offs; for instance, the cost will be approximately five times higher than running the system in the data centre; with initial data, it’s not unlikely the annual cost may be up to 2,000,000 USD. We aim to optimise and control this cost going forward.
For a non-profit with a duty to carefully steward their members' money this seems hard to justify.
