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It depends on what you do. Cloud boxes are insanely expensive (easily 10x the price of the equivalent in house box, taking hosting, power, cooling, hw into account). To make this work, you need a combination of variable demand, and only paying for partial salaries (your cloud boxes are mutualized with other people's boxes). If you're a reasonably big company (tens of thousands of servers) , with fairly stable demand, and adequate capacity planning, you won't necessarily save a huge amount of money by outsourcing your DCs. You can argue that the gcp/aws guys are better than you at running fleets of servers and data centers , but at 10x the price, it's worth double checking. If all I do is raw compute 100% of the time on a very large scale, it's extremely likely I want to do it myself. Obviously, there's more than raw hardware to the cloud, starting with all kinds of managed services, which can be worth it. Again , you'll have to do the maths :10x for the boxes, then extra for the distributed db?
Does it give me a competitive advantage? Better time to market? In the end, there are good use cases, and bad use cases for the cloud, and I don't think it's as clear cut as what you say. EDIT : if cloud hardware prices were not completely ridiculous (say 2x), then it might suddenly be a lot more compelling, and I would most likely agree with you (security / regulatory issues aside). |
I can get this dedicated server in Germany (courtesy of hetzner.com) for 40 eur / 47 usd per month (albeit usd is relatively weak right now): CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-6700 Quad-Core RAM: 64 GB DDR4 Drives: 2x 512 GB NVMe SSD
Building an equivalent computer would cost me around 1300 eur / 1540 usd without VAT (assuming the RAM is ECC).
Let's assume a 12.5 eur / 15 usd of electricity per month and the computer will pay itself in 2 years. It's hard to price maintenance, issues and hardware failures, but I feel like this computer could last 4-5 years, making the price roughly 2x.