Great analysis! The cloud vs colo debate is fascinating but often misses the operational overhead discussion.

While zackify's math on raw compute cost is compelling, there's hidden complexity: How much time does your team spend on hardware failures, network issues, IPMI troubleshooting, firmware updates, etc? For CI/build workloads specifically, colo makes sense because downtime is just inconvenience.

But for production workloads, I've seen too many "we'll just rack a few servers" projects turn into full-time infrastructure jobs. Cloud's value isn't just compute - it's shifting operational burden.

That said, hybrid approaches work well: Use cloud for production and autoscaling, colo for predictable batch workloads like CI. The benchmark shows AMD Turin's strong performance across providers - that consistency is valuable even if you pay a premium.