Do you mean to imply that cloud services at higher levels of abstraction are cheaper per unit of compute than simple VMs? I believe you’ll find that the opposite is true.
At the scale discussed here, there are no free lunches.
At the scale discussed here, there are no free lunches.
Managing VMs with dedicated resources directly means you have to distribute the load manually, leading to unused and wasted resources.
While I don’t personally have experience with more enterprise-y solutions like VMWare, I have to imagine they have more complete solutions already baked-in.