The only confusing thing about this is: you’re cool with AWS but insist on deploying your own hardware for personal projects!
You can buy a lot of EC2 compute per month before you hit the cost of running outdated servers on your power bill.
You can buy a lot of EC2 compute per month before you hit the cost of running outdated servers on your power bill.
I'm using around 3TB of space on it currently, which would cost around $70/month in S3 or $12/month in Glacier (in reality I'd use a combination of S3/Glacier so my costs would be somewhere between $12 and $70/month)
Granted, the hardware costs me around $25/month amortized over 3 years but my internet speed isn't fast enough (or unlimited enough) to let cloud storage be a viable replacement of a local fileserver.
And yeah, S3 is not a fileserver replacement,AWS's best solution for that would be EFS, but that'd cost me $900/month for my usage.
You can buy a 1u server with 2 processors / 24 logical cores and 32 gigs of ram off ebay for around $150.
Say what you have is 2x L5640 Xeons (pretty common, again on ebay). You'll be drawing 80-150W depending on load per cpu. Let's say it's on the upper end and you draw about 250W.
Average electric costs in the US are 12c/kwh. That means those cores will cost around $20/month.
In reality, other things draw power, but your average usage will be lower, so $20/month for 32GB of ram and 24 kinda crappy cores is about right power wise.
Look at AWS's pricing and tell me I can get anything even approaching that at such a good price point.
None of the additional Amazon cloud features are even in play with the above scenario.
> You can buy a lot of EC2 compute per month before you hit the cost of running outdated servers on your power bill.
I can't see any way of interpreting that other than as them claiming the dumb comparison I just made plays out differently than it does.
If the parent comment said something like "It will take a lot of time and money to reproduce any meaningful percentage of what EC2 offers" I'd be in agreement... but the parent comment was directly comparing a power bill with ec2 compute costs.
All of this was acquired for bargain prices second hand. I'll probably sell it on in a few years for at least 50% of what I paid, too.
But I agree, often AWS is better for your lab than a home server, particularly if what you need to test is clustering.
Also, Elastic Filestore over a VPN connection is not a particularly great experience ;)