alt Hacker NewsFair point!
5 - Datacenter (DC) - Like 4, except also take control of the space/power/HVAC/transit/security side of the equation. Makes sense either at scale, or if you have specific needs. Specific needs could be: specific location, reliability (higher or lower than a DC), resilience (conflict planning).
There are actually some really interesting use cases here. For example, reliability: If your company is in a physical office, how strong is the need to run your internal systems in a data centre? If you run your servers in your office, then there's no connectivity reliability concerns. If the power goes out, then the power is out to your staff's computers anyway (still get a UPS though).
Or perhaps you don't need as high reliability if you're doing only batch workloads? Do you need to pay the premium for redundant network connections and power supplies?
If you want your company to still function in the event of some kind of military conflict, do you really want to rely on fibre optic lines between your office and the data center? Do you want to keep all your infrastructure in such a high-value target?
I think this is one of the more interesting areas to think about, at least for me!
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Personally I haven't seen a scenario where it makes sense beyond a small experimental lab where you value the ability to tinker physically with the hardware regularly.
Offices are usually very expensive real estate in city centers and with very limited cooling capabilities.
Then again the US is a different place, they don't have cities like in Europe (bar NYC).
If you have less than a rack of hardware, if you have physical security requirements, and/or your hardware is used in the office more than from the internet, it can make sense.
5 was a great option for ml work last year since colo rented didn't come with a 10kW cable. With ram, sd and GPU prices the way they are now I have no idea what you'd need to do.
Thank goodness we did all the capex before the OpenAI ram deal and expensive nvidia gpus were the worst we had to deal with.
When I worked IT for a school district at the beginning of my career (2006-2007), I was blown away that every school had a MASSIVE server room (my office at each school - the MDF). 3-5 racks filled (depending on school size and connection speed to the central DC - data closet) 50-75% was networking equipment (5 PCs per class hardwired), 10% was the Novell Netware server(s) and storage, the other 15% was application storage for app distributions on login.