[corford]

You could order 16 of these https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/px121-ssd

Minimum contract length: 1 month, total cost (including setup): $4,384 (on-going month to month cost thereafter: ~$2,191.20).

For that you'd get an aggregate total of 4TB RAM, 7.6TB HDD (SSD), 96 real Intel E5-1650 v3 cores (or 192 vCPUs) and 800TB of bandwidth.

Sprinkle with terraform/ansible/k8s/docker and you have a resilient, massively powerful compute cloud with no long term obligation that's about half the price of GCE if you keep it around beyond 30 days. Or another way to look at it: if you needed such a platform for two years, your second year would be free compared to GCE.

One major issue with this approach (versus GCE's "all in one" box) could be network performance bottlenecks depending on what task(s) you were using such a cluster for.