I don't really get it. You can't buy the same stuff, so reorganize your business to produce the same value by doing less stuff? It seems like advice that you could follow to achieve massive cost savings even without involving clouds.
Not necessarily doing less stuff. There are basic things like Singapore being more expensive than the US, so why not host there? Maybe analyse if you use that much storage all the time, or would some mix of EBS/S3 be better? How much utilisation is there really? Maybe you can scale down often? Or use bare metal instances rather than EC2? Also, you can negotiate way lower pricing that what's published.
This post is basically "see how bad a knife is for unscrewing screws". They're showing off how unfamiliar they are with AWS offering. And that's unrelated to which solution wins for this scenario.
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.
You absolutely do not have to distribute VMs manually. This [0] is a tiny Python script run as a cron that migrates VMs in a Proxmox (also free) cluster according to CPU utilization. You could extend it for other parameters.
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.
Right, now factor in the cost of architecting software not because that’s the best architecture for your use case but to save money on the specific infrastructure choice you’ve made.
...in the worst way imaginable
Doing a direct lift and shift with 1:1 replacement of instances is, intentionally, prohibitibely expensive, so you stop and think.