alt Hacker NewsThen the claim above can never be falsified because there will always be a value you can plug into the equation at which it's cheaper to rent (like at 50% occupancy, at 5%, at 0.5%... so long as you're not the only person in the world who wants to use the device being offered for loan). I would assume we're talking about a common workload where one actually needs the device that one considers purchasing for some reasonable fraction of the time and not less than half the time
So in summary:
- own the hardware, if you have constant load and have enough expertise (personally or a team) to use/maintain it at your required reliability level
- rent the cloud, if your usage is opportunistic/ spike’y/rapidly changing
- also rent the cloud, if required expertise/maintenance would cost you more than the hardware (if you want to have gazillion of nines, you need somebody who’s there to deal with smoking stuff, in several locations)