4 ms·

How long will it take to amortize the costs of the hardware based on EC2 g2.xlarge savings?

• skuhn 11y ago
  Not certain if I understand your question, but I'll take a shot at answering: I expect a useful life span for any datacenter equipment of 3 years. A Mac Pros list price is about $4000. We pay less but I'll use public figures throughout. Using equipment leasing, I can pay that $4000 over the 3 year period, with let's say a 5% interest rate and no residual value (to keep this simple). So over 3 years, I spend $4315 in total per machine to get 2200 gflop/s. Over 3 years with EC2, a g2.xlarge is $7410 up front (to secure a 57% discount) for 2300 gflop/s. So I can pay over time, save $3100 over a 3 year period, and probably still resell the Mac Pro for $500 at the end of its life span. That's pretty compelling math to me. There are costs involved with building and operating a datacenter, and that evens things out a bit. What really kills EC2 though is the network bandwidth costs. It is just insane.