I also have to keep reminding my coworkers that AWS gives us faster cores every few years but so far they always have the exact same amount of memory. So caching things (especially in process, but also on loop back) to save computation isn’t really a winning long term strategy. It’s never going to get better than what it does for you in the beginning. It will only decline in value.
In the very short term. Data centers are expensive as hell to operate, but so is the cloud. I think colo would have been the way to go.