When we account for cost of, 1) remote hands 2) network switches 3) hardware components you'll need for redundancy, I've personally replaced network cards be

When we account for cost of, 1) remote hands 2) network switches 3) hardware components you'll need for redundancy, I've personally replaced network cards because fans burned out or HDDs because of usual failure rate. 4) when I'm done using a n1-highcpu-32 I stop using it and not pay for it, or when I need 5 of those for 2 hours I provision them and stop when I'm done running a workload. 5) upgrades to hardware or additional hardware, intel released skylake, should I buy those and try to sell my Haswell on eBay? I'm not sure it becomes a simple price of server + colo cost comparison. With GCP (I use daily), AWS (I used to use) or Azure, what I'm paying for is someone else to focus on things like colo leases, capacity expansion, redundancy, physical security and provide higher order services - load balancers, BigTable/BigQuery, CloudSQL/RDS, GKE, DataProc. This allows me to run all of infra as close to capacity as possible while avoiding any wasted cycles However I do miss going to data centers and hear my machines hum and blink, that is quite the feeling.