| Really? I just priced up a 128-core (dual EYPC) Dell server with specs comparable to a matching Azure cloud server (HB120rs_v3), and the "1 year reserved" price for Azure came out to about the same as the purchase price over 3 years. The 3-year reserved price is about the same as the purchase price over 4 years. There's a new 5-year reservation option, which is the equivalent of owning the hardware for 7 years. Spot pricing is the equivalent of amortizing the purchase price over 12 years!! Meanwhile, using the cloud, you can upgrade to the 9004 series in just a few months, not 12 years from now. And then whatever comes after the 9004 series in like 2 years, not 5, 7, or 12. So it looks like that at the larger scales, the pricing is very directly competitive with on-premises hardware. Consider that the cloud hosts include most basic operations costs, such as cooling, electricity, data centre floor space rental, the SFP ports and cabling, etc, etc... Speaking of which, a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation is that a 128 core server will cost about $20K in cooling and electricity over its lifetime. Note that the Azure HB120rs_v3 sizes come with 200 Gbps InfiniBand "just thrown in" for laughs. Try pricing that up some time, in case you want to build your own hyperconverged infrastructure! Admittedly, at the smaller sizes, Azure and AWS are less competitive, but you do get flexibility, automation, and a bunch of other stuff that's difficult and expensive at scale on-prem. |