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Long term, but up front costs are what make cloud services appealing.
FWIW, it's possible to minimize your idle VM costs to an extent. For example, you could use one or more autoscale groups for your cluster and keep them scaled to one vm each. Then use tools like cluster auto scaler to resize on demand as your workload grows. You are correct that idle vm costs can't be completely avoided. At least not as far as I am aware.
