There is a real need for people who want to do development/test with on-premises servers, and then migrate the end product to an AWS or similar environment. At least with AMD64 you can reliably do this.
Pay it no mind that developing software and testing it on AWS is an order of magnitude more expensive than doing things on-premises: don't worry, you're not being ripped off any more than usual! All of those big "unicorn" tech companies you look up to are doing it—everyone from BP to GE to the people who rip you off on concert tickets to the guys that made Fortnite—it's all the rage, nowadays!
That $20,000,000 in venture capital you got could surely be used to set up a dev environment for almost two whole months! Call now and we'll even throw in three whole extra days (throttled by 50%)!﹡
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Is there any truth to this? Every time I see this claim, it is actually comparing the price tag for servers in the on-prem case with the price tag for compute on AWS/etc (which includes a whole lot of engineering and data center management costs). It's a pretty meaningless comparison.
My guess is that AWS has the economies of scale to outperform your average private data center on a total-cost-of-ownership basis.
I could double the cores and mem probably too.
If you operate at sufficient scales to amortize the fixed overhead of operations (which is not that large of a scale), you can break even running your own server infrastructure within 12 months versus AWS if you know what you are doing. That last part is a big caveat, but not a large hurdle.
There are other considerations but in pure hardware terms, on AWS you've bought the hardware after 6 months of utilization.
So in reality I will always times the cost of server ( over X months period ) + colocation / month by 2.5. And Double that to give them Margin for support etc.
That is roughly 5x the cost. And in most cases seems to be what AWS is charging for.
Not saying I agree with their pricing.
Or you could get an eight core / 32GB ram machine for under $230 on eBay.
Oh and you need a DR site too, so double it.
And staff up 4x for 24x7 operations and build an orchestration layer yourself.
I’ve done the math in a lot of scenarios, including (especially) staff time. Running your own real data center doesn’t make long-term financial sense unless you are in the mid-hundreds of physical servers.
Colo might make a bit more sense for some situations, but there’s a reason so much is being moved to cloud providers. The people doing it aren’t stupid.
My guess is the advantage evaporates.
A bit of browsing on Geekbench suggests that one a1.4xlarge instance (i.e. two a1.2xlarges) is roughly comparable to a Ryzen 3400G. Adding in rough costs for the other components (motherboard, power supply, case, and 32GB of RAM), a bare-metal system equivalent to an a1.4xlarge looks like it would cost maybe $500-600 to buy outright.
In other words, if all you care about is raw CPU performance, then over long periods of time AWS costs more than 10x as much as bare-metal per unit of performance, even with up-front reserved instances.
For 3 months, I was charged $11,$23, and finally $4 for 3 days of the 3rd months, where I QUICKLY cancelled the server...this is OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive for a single processor, 1G RAM, 30GB SSD cloud server!
$37 for some 64 days is totally overpriced. You can get high quality low cost cloud servers for less then $5/month, and if you purchase a full year, half that.
Amazon really disappointed me with their FREE bait-n-switch bullshit marketing, and I will NEVER recommend their low end servers again.
Only this many cents to use this thing, which, heh, I guess it requires this thing too, and this thing, and this thing ... man, some of these cents are adding up. Oh, a "NAT Gateway" is $30/mo? Well, OK. Keep going for a few weeks and you're staring down a bill for a rather scary number of cents while the CFO's angry rants can be heard half-way across the office.
There are entire consultancies that specialize in decoding AWS bills. Let's not pull leg here.
We don't necessarily care about matching absolute production performance, but could throttle things to get the right ratio between performance of CPU, memory bandwidth, disk IO, etc, in order to explore which code tweaks will have the biggest relative impact on your workload. It would let you do a bunch of your testing and optimization locally, for free.
Could be an edge to distinguish you from the competition, although I'm not sure it's a big enough one to warrant a business case. Maybe it would be attractive to shops whose development costs are high compared to production (i.e. startups and enterprises with lots of ongoing customization), but probably not so much for the established, internet-based businesses where I'm guessing the big money is (like Netflix).
Make a free game, capable of cross-platform multiplayer across nearly all devices, and let people waste their money on skins and dances that give no competitive edge if they want to.
First the software, then the hardware: This is the ultimate lock-in.
Not to mention the environmental impact of doing so.