Came here to say this. Load up on $20 2TB SAS drives in an R510 or something like that, and you'll use a little more power, but also be beating the pants off AWS for cost/GB purposes.

Wait, where can you purchase 2 TB drives at $20 USD?

Yup. My homelab currently looks like 2 x HP Z400s for grunt work, and some HP microservers for light duties. When I'm not actively labbing, a microserver does daily home network duties (Pihole, firewall etc) and sips power.

All of this was acquired for bargain prices second hand. I'll probably sell it on in a few years for at least 50% of what I paid, too.

Comparing raw hardware with one of the dozens of services offered by AWS is absurd to say at least, as you’re basically ignoring the whole platform that enhances “EC2” - of course raw hardware price will always win, but that doesn’t really mean anything as the comparison isn’t a good one.

As a base problem of "I need fast storage and CPU resources" isn't necessarily solved in the cloud either. If you're deploying hardware that needs to write large amounts of data daily and requires high CPU availability, even if AWS pricing was ok, you're still connectivity bound, which itself is an increased cost. I can also see this being valuable for MSSP's deploying assets across client networks and wanting to manage encryption keys in the cloud, vs on prem.

None of the additional Amazon cloud features are even in play with the above scenario.

Yes, I agree that it's a dumb comparison. I'm only making it to refute the parent comment which said:

> You can buy a lot of EC2 compute per month before you hit the cost of running outdated servers on your power bill.

I can't see any way of interpreting that other than as them claiming the dumb comparison I just made plays out differently than it does.

If the parent comment said something like "It will take a lot of time and money to reproduce any meaningful percentage of what EC2 offers" I'd be in agreement... but the parent comment was directly comparing a power bill with ec2 compute costs.