Yes the raw compute cost is much higher (and the performance often less) than bare metal, but software development is really, really expensive. With the public cloud you get the result of literally millions of programmer-hours "for free". To many that's worth it (at least at first, below a certain scale).
This is also one reason why Kubernetes is really exciting, BTW. It's a control plane that you don't have to rent.
Do you have any other recommendations for queue systems that can handle a million messages per minute (our use case)?
Almost all of the systems tested hit 17k / s (aside from NSQ) -- on a laptop. NATS (gnatsd) hits 0.2M per second, that's a magnitude above what you need and that's a brokered system, if your task fits with a brokerless one then nanomsg is yet another magnitude. I do not particularly see where the problem really is?
Thanks
DDOS, multi-path, multi-az, dr, snapshots, hardware redundancy, elasticity, freedom from datacenter contracts, fiber contracts, driving to rack stuff, jammed fingers, staff costs, firmware bugs, bad hardware batches, cdn, compliance costs. I have more but I'll stop there.
It doesn't make sense at very small or large scales but it captures a hell of a lot of the middle.