[DrScientist]

As long as you have decent utilisation then buying and running your own hardware is typically a lot cheaper than using AWS etc al.

Cloud shines for dynamic loads, global resilience etc - but if you just want to run a lot of computational jobs for a long time, then running your own kit is likely to be much much cheaper.

The other advantage of your own kit is you can guarantee it will be available when you want it, and you can optimise the stack for your own applications.

There is a reason something like 3/4 of Amazons profits come from AWS and not selling books et al.

[elric]

> As long as you have decent utilisation then buying and running your own hardware is typically a lot cheaper than using AWS etc al.

The cynic in me suspects that some government consultant (I used to be one) is making a lot of money from peddling AWS/Azure.

[graypegg]

It does make me wonder if some nationalized utility like "British Compute" or something would be a good idea. They could over-allocate and sell the unused resources to the private sector, AWS style. Could bring long term costs down even further. (With bonus political levers to pull, like giving British owned companies special rates)

[DrScientist]

Are you suggesting an offshoot of British Energy - as a lot of the costs are energy costs anyway?

Note the same logic as above applies for centralised services whether it be British Compute or AWS versus having your own - any central service is going to have overheads around managing the shared resources - virtualisation, scheduling, availability, security, billing etc.

As in the real world - sometimes a renting model sense, but you pay a premium for the convenience.

[graypegg]

That is my thinking, yes. Plus also simply the government has access to a lot of capital and land.

Overhead from running your own datacentres is a factor, but (taking this report at face-value) it seems like there will be some modicum of government owned computer resources built. I feel like the cost difference between standing up a small datacentre capable of what they are pitching, versus standing up an over-allocated datacentre is mostly centred on initial 1-time cost. Once things are running, the ongoing cost may not be much different. Even if the government was the only client at a small datacentre, they would still have to have support, maintenance, and management. If they were instead selling over-allocated resources back to the private sector, there would be sales staff, but otherwise the other expenditures would remain nearly the same. They wouldn't even have to be that competitive on anything other than price, functioning much like a utility. Fancy PaaS features can be fully the responsibility of the private sector to develop on top of the true-blue british metal + electrons the government is offering up.

[DrScientist]

Shared resources add complexity - perhaps a middle ground would be a government run data centre ( modular nuclear reactor etc, reuse of wate heat etc ) which various organisations can host their own hardware.

This already exists in the private sector ( but without the dedicated nuclear reactors ).

[graypegg]

Good idea. Co-location does let the government's current expertise shine (energy, land access)

My point is there's something there I think! This report buries the lede with AI keyword drivel, but there's an opportunity beyond just hype in there.