because the marginal cost of hardware once the chassis is racked is trivial compared to the public cloud, which is insanely marked up for retail on exactly this concept.
GCE seems poorly engineered if the profit margins are indeed low (normal, that is).
Interestingly, the "3 cores for 1 user acing one" would explain the pricing of "preemptible" instances - which can cost as little as 1/3rd of full instance. And the main difference is that they are fully rescheduled every 24h or more often, and there's no live-migration for maintenance...
… I am now wondering if GCE runs fault-tolerant VMs. Because if it does, holy moly
A GCE VM spins up in less than a minute. I've seen them come up in 20 seconds.