[rjsamson]

Quick comment on the comparison of AWS cost to DIY cost - for AWS costs you're using the on demand pricing for 3 years and comparing it to the cost of buying hardware over 3 years. If you're going to be running instances for 3 years you're probably going to be using reserved instances - in the case of m3.medium instances the rate drops from $0.070 / hour to $0.0261 / hour.

So, with the 3 year reserved pricing your total cost ends up being something like $411,544 - less than half the cost of the referenced $880,000 hardware purchase price.

[deitcher]

You are 100% correct. That is why the article explicitly listed it as an assumption, and that the advantage for public cloud over private hardware is even better once you account for that.

[rjsamson]

Whoops - totally missed that assumption!