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I did this for a while, except my thin client was an X1 Carbon (!) Have you calculated how much it's costing you? I ended up scripting up a way to find the ch

I did this for a while, except my thin client was an X1 Carbon (!) Have you calculated how much it's costing you? I ended up scripting up a way to find the cheapest Spot Instance price from Amazon for whatever workload I needed - if I was doing builds I wanted the 8 core machines (c4.2xlarge?). They're ~11c an hour as a Spot Instance, although it's 3x the amount for a Windows instance, and I'd be pushed out of the market if everyone started doing this. I think I was averaging a couple of dollars a day, so I suppose it comes out in favour of using AWS all the time.

geofft 11y ago
So my current VPS is a non-virtual Kimsufi box for which I'm paying $28 (USD)/month, i.e., $336/year. I'm also paying about $10/month more for a cell phone plan with enough mobile data, which brings that to $456/year. An equivalently-specced laptop that is comfortable enough to use (lightweight, cool, not going to break on me, etc.) would cost me about 2-3 times that amount, and I'd want to replace it at least that often. (Also if I had a powerful local laptop, I couldn't tell it to do a build, close the lid, and get on the subway without my backpack catching fire. Nor could I have it provide IPv6 to my apartment, host websites behind CloudFlare, provide shells to my friends, etc.) If I wanted to put some more effort into it, I could certainly do a good fraction of my work (git clone, vi, IRC and email, etc.) on a micro instance. But even a couple of dollars a day would require me to be pretty careful to come out cheaper.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  Sweet! Thanks for that information. Until my net connection becomes more reliable it's not really an option for me 24/7. I think my costs would be a bit higher because Kimsufi/OVH/Hetzner are 300-400ms away from me, so the latency is a bit uncomfortable. When I was in Canada, a Hetzner box was 200ms away and usable, but for ~$30 a month I only had a dual core box - a bit restrictive when doing large builds. I might have a go at automating setting up a dev environment on AWS which can be torn down when not in use.

geofft 11y ago

So my current VPS is a non-virtual Kimsufi box for which I'm paying $28 (USD)/month, i.e., $336/year. I'm also paying about $10/month more for a cell phone plan with enough mobile data, which brings that to $456/year. An equivalently-specced laptop that is comfortable enough to use (lightweight, cool, not going to break on me, etc.) would cost me about 2-3 times that amount, and I'd want to replace it at least that often. (Also if I had a powerful local laptop, I couldn't tell it to do a build, close the lid, and get on the subway without my backpack catching fire. Nor could I have it provide IPv6 to my apartment, host websites behind CloudFlare, provide shells to my friends, etc.) If I wanted to put some more effort into it, I could certainly do a good fraction of my work (git clone, vi, IRC and email, etc.) on a micro instance. But even a couple of dollars a day would require me to be pretty careful to come out cheaper.

voltagex_ 11y ago
Sweet! Thanks for that information. Until my net connection becomes more reliable it's not really an option for me 24/7. I think my costs would be a bit higher because Kimsufi/OVH/Hetzner are 300-400ms away from me, so the latency is a bit uncomfortable. When I was in Canada, a Hetzner box was 200ms away and usable, but for ~$30 a month I only had a dual core box - a bit restrictive when doing large builds. I might have a go at automating setting up a dev environment on AWS which can be torn down when not in use.