Comment by mochomocha

> Why Should I Pay for Peak Load? [...] someone in that supply chain is charging you based on their peak load

Oh it's even worse than that: this someone oversubscribe your hardware a little during your peak and a lot during your trough, padding their great margins at the expense of extra cache misses/perf degradation of your software that most of the time you won't notice if they do their job well.

This is one of the reasons why large companies such as my employer (Netflix) are able to invest into their own compute platforms to reclaim some of these gains back, so that any oversubscription & collocation gains materialize into a lower cloud bill - instead of having your spare CPU cycles be funneled to a random co-tenant customer of your cloud provider, the latter capturing the extra value.