[shrubble]

340 VMs is maybe at most, 2 racks of equipment.

So figure 4 racks, 2 racks in each of 2 locations. That's not even 500k in equipment. Telecoms run 'tandem' and that is good enough even for 911 infrastructure.

10gb of decent quality internet at each location is another 2x 5k per month. Power space etc. and remote hands is 2k x 4 racks is 8k per month.

So 500k capex plus 18k per month. And how much are they paying AWS?

[imperialdrive]

I gave up trying to spread the good word... it's like gramps telling the youngins to build a nice house somewhere scenic, good bones, raise a family... instead they go live at a WeWork, and rent Ikea furniture by the minute... the tide may turn as money gets less and less cheap.

Still, the engineers gotta feel good about saving all that money, and the environment may feel good about the energy savings too. I hope they get a nice bonus for rolling up their sleeves.

[bfung]

It's not quite as simple as that. User boulos's comment below adds more to the estimate given and includes things that tech companies these days don't want to contend with / have flexibility towards.

In general, you're correct, but in colo-skills don't exist with AWS/GCP power users today. Management and skills of tech companies today don't even know where to start for hiring colo-skills. So it's all avoided w/the cloud tax.

[dilyevsky]

Righto and while you’re setting all of this up (which usually takes months) your business is going to competition who just spun up a few nodes with a couple lines or terraform (or just autoscaled to demand). Also 10g link is hilarious - you will get x30 that on gcp for this many cores.