As long as you realize that the “cloud” is someone else’s computer, it is a very viable way of hosting your service. However as your service grows all those micro services that your cloud provider charges you for will grow as well. Eventually you’ll get to the point where “data transfer” costs begins to make up >50% of your total cloud spend. At that point (or ideally before) you should have a plan to stop expanding your cloud footprint, because that cost grows geometrically with the size of your cloud data and the number of cloud functions you are using on your data.

Remember Data has Weight. If you don’t understand what that means, you aren’t ready to make a cost comparison between cloud-hosting and data center hosting.