Not to take away from the entire conversation above, which in fact was very detailed and specific comparison. The major take away in your pro/con evaluation needs to be Physical Disk compared to Network or some level of shared Disk. Also in a big ha system there are usually more than one disk (not to mean more than one partition). When you go past dev and POC level benchmarking, deep into performance tuning, the Physical Disk, in high availability arrays, with a physical machine will out perform the Cloud or VMs for large volume and large data processes. To get more specific you have to compare all the nuts and bolts as well as evaluate the Performance Best Practices for each platform, service, component, all the way down to application design. This is a great debate and one that I have at every customer. That said I have led prod clusters installs in the cloud: Amazon, Azure, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud, and Private Cloud and VM systems.
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