alt Hacker NewsThe best part of cloud providers is that short-term VMs are relatively cheap to deploy. You don't need a full active-active failover setup, you just need to design your infrastructure in a cloud-agnostic way and test the deployment scripts a few times a year.
The most expensive part is going to be maintaining an up-to-date offsite data backup. Running a few VMs for a handful of hours is basically free.
> you just need to design your infrastructure in a cloud-agnostic way
But that's one helluva "just", and also means that you can't use the platform-specific features that make life easier. In practice that's probably way more expensive than spinning some testing VPSes up and down.