What about power, cooling, rent in the building for the room you're keeping them in, backup generator, internet connectivity, administration costs (setup, repairs, installation), etc?
>> “The public cloud is phenomenal if you really need its elasticity,” Frenkiel says. “But if you don’t — if you do a consistent amount of workload — it’s far, far better to go in-house.”
Yup.
I think we'll see more companies using a hybrid model where you can run your steady-state workload level on dedicated gear but with the ability burst into a cloud to handle peaks and flash demand.
Also renting dedicated servers can be really fast.
Most companies that I've dealt with just rent space in a colo and those costs, plus bandwidth, are far less than $200k.
>administration costs (setup, repairs, >installation), etc?
It doesn't take that long to rack and stack. Maybe a day for 20 servers if you're doing it alone.
Remember, Amazon built its cloud not for the public, but for itself! The cloud gave them a clean separation of duties and cost management between application development and operations. That sort of thing can save large amounts of money and bureaucratic headache. They started selling AWS to the public only after they had a stable system that could produce excess capacity, which could then be resold.
Instant snowflake, just add expensive and archaic enterprise middleware.
Disclaimer: I work for AWS.
You could triple your provisions with the savings of not being on the cloud, so it's hard to believe you won't see the train coming, if the concern is having to rack more than 20-60 servers a day. Arguably, that would be a good problem to have!