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Right and if certain times of the year you need an eight bedroom house for a week, while other times a two bedroom is fine, then renting may be way cheaper than buying an eight bedroom house.

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This analogy doesn't really apply because thanks to bandwidth charges, it's uneconomical to have a 2-bed house (outside of the cloud) and occasionally rent the 8-bed in the cloud, so you're forced to also get the 2-bed one in the cloud and pay insane margins on that too.

Extending this metaphor, I would then want to own my two bedroom home, and take a vacation to the rented mansion.

Is there a well trodden way to serve most of your everyday traffic out of your own datacenter, but scale out to cloud infra when traffic peaks?

It's doable but the egress bandwidth charges (which are there to prevent exactly this) from most clouds may negate any savings.

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