I’ve been studying like a fiend to get AWS certs and thoroughly understand the cloud value proposition, especially for ephemeral workloads and compliance needs.

I’ve been studying like a fiend to get AWS certs and thoroughly understand the cloud value proposition, especially for ephemeral workloads and compliance needs. I’m all for cloud solutions that make sense and love when serverless/usage-only systems can’t be deployed. That said, I recently started work on a friend’s system that he has had running in colo for a long time. It’s absolutely insane how long his systems have been up. There are processes that have been alive since 2015, with some hosts having uptime linger than that. He’s got a nice HA configuration but hasn’t had any incidents that have triggered failover. He recently built a rack for his home with 384gb ram and gobs of cpu across 3 nodes, with rack, nice switch and UPS for just shy of $2500 ( he is quite the bargain hunter... ). I did some quick math and found a similarly equipped cluster (of just VMs, not dedicated hosts) has a 1.1 month break-even with on-demand costs, no bandwidth considered. Sure, maybe a 1 year reservation could make it a 2-3 month break even instead, but why? Those machines can easily give him 3-5 years of performance without paying another dime. If you can feasibly run workloads onpremise or colo and have a warm failover to AWS you could probably have the best of all worlds.