You could do this even just pegging the line 9 minutes per day and otherwise leaving it unused. ;)
People forget just how affordable it can be to maintain your own infrastructure. You can have the hardware and network capable of supporting 10X your average traffic loads and still have it operate far more cost effectively than the equivalent traffic on AWS.
At my work, we slashed our overall hosting costs by moving a data warehouse off of AWS and on to our own self-maintained infrastructure.
But with a bloated inefficient IT department or non-savvy negotiations with hardware vendors or transit providers, it can also be more expensive than AWS.
What you get from AWS is the logistics pipeline is already built as is the infrastructure should you suddenly require to serve factors of traffic more.
The ROI of AWS comes from the backend and capex vs opex debates.
Example : The CFO can go to the board and explain we are getting ready to reduce opex by laying off 10 developers at 150k yr during any meeting. The capex cost is usually fixed and hard to explain away.
The other is stupendous burst activity, like you just need a thousand(s) cores for a couple hours. Of course this doesen't mean the baseload has to be in AWS, just easy for small teams.
It's generally a function of network cost versus infra cost, and so the 'equation' solves differently based on the longest tech cycles, from inception to maturity to skill pool to diminishing returns and then back again on some other mode — this really is a decade+ thing.
Some "always true" inherent advantages of one approach (e.g. availability for cloud, or resources for on-prems) would remain across cycles as permanent gains; disruption then occurs when some new approach (e.g. containerization) fundamentally upsets the order of costs.
It used to be OpEx was easy, CapEx was hard to get approved. As people took advantage and OpEx went through the roof people are getting alot more pushback on reducing OpEx.
Pushing back on OpEx in favor of CapEx might be seen as a more long-term strategy too. Basically rent vs purchase, even for deprecating assets like infosys, as I think the current DevOps trend (scaling in pure software, virtualization, etc) makes it easier than ever to squeeze every last FLOP on-premises.
Okay, like AWS
> and doing that is a service that it’s probably worth paying for.
Okay, but how many orders of magnitude?
That's an expensive disk drive.