What price Cloud?

Paul Stovell

Paul Stovell

— 1 min read
This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work. The text is preserved here for posterity.

I wanted to set up the infrastructure for Octopus properly. This meant that I needed:

  • A SQL server
  • A TeamCity server
  • A Web server or two (for OctopusDeploy.com)
  • A domain controller
  • A handful of servers for an Octopus test farm

Some of these servers are public, most would be private. I just moved overseas so I didn't want to put another server in my living room. I started by looking at some cloud providers. Here are some really rough, back-of-the-envelope calculations (for Windows servers):

ProviderCPURAMPer hourPer month (750 hours)
Amazon EC2 1 core 1.7gb $0.12 $90
Azure Compute 1 core 1.75gb $0.12 $90

Discounts are available if you buy spot instances or reserve hours, but from what I can gather, I'd be looking at $400-$500/month to have half a dozen 'small' servers on the cloud.

For my needs, it turned out to be cheaper to rent a high-spec dedicated server, and to have my own mini-cloud. LeaseWeb came to the rescue - for the last three months I've been renting a Quad core, 24GB RAM server for €190 (about $270 today). With 24gb I can run 10 'small' Azure instances, or about $900 worth of 'cloud'. What I do miss out on is the rapid provisioning. If I needed a second of these servers, it could take over a week to provision one.

If Octopus was a cloud service, I'd definitely look at offloading this to a real cloud provider. But for running TeamCity and a handful of test VM's, it appears to me that putting a server in a data centre is still more cost effective. Is that your experience?

Read more