Do we actually have to go over this once more? Based on a new study from ServerPronto University (yes, really), private cloud (read: legacy data centers dressed up in cloudy clothes) are 3x cheaper than Amazon Web Services (AWS). Dell founder Michael Dell took the allurement, touting EMC-Dell-based VxRail equally 2-4x cheaper than AWS.

It'due south a nice idea, just reminds me of Trautman'southward declaration to Rambo: "It's over Johnny. Information technology'southward over!" to which Rambo replies: "Zippo is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off!"

Significant, the silly deject price state of war is over and, really, it never begun. The cloud has never been a question of cost, but rather one of convenience.

Garbage in, garbage out

However, it's worth digging into the cost claims, if briefly. ServerPronto is (wait for it!) a dedicated server hosting company. That means information technology gets paid to push servers on enterprises, even every bit the earth increasingly thinks virtually serverless calculating (as the natural extension of deject computing, wherein the server disappears entirely and only services/functions thing). 1 other mail it published recently suggests a disconnect from reality: The Uncomplicated Reason Companies are Abandoning the Deject.

Because, um, that's happening?…

If you look at ServerPronto's numbers, it's a wonder that anyone would e'er consider running annihilation in the public cloud. After all, the company finds that AWS costs $2,762.81 a calendar month for a comparable configuration, while the individual cloud offering costs a mere $899 a month (even the pricing is optimized for optics–it's non $900 per month. It's $899).

SEE: AWS isn't the cheapskate'southward cloud, and Amazon doesn't care (TechRepublic)

Things enter bizarro-land, however, when ServerPronto spells out the reasons private server (I hateful, "cloud") hosting manages to be so much cheaper:

The difference between public cloud hosting and private cloud hosting is unproblematic. A public deject is utilized by multiple tenants who each rent out some of the cloud's resources. This is the service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft'southward Azure, Google Cloud Platform and more. A private cloud is a cloud setup which is utilized by a single tenant. The difference is small, but it does make a big impact.

Well, yes. But that "bear upon" is completely in the public cloud's favor. It's a truism that private servers sitting in an boilerplate enterprise information center get used simply 5-10% of the time. ServerPronto's $899/month covers just a fraction of what you'd need to pay to get remotely shut to the public cloud's levels of utilization.

The toll of convenience

The company might answer: "Simply that'south not the point! Even with our profound waste product of coin, energy, and materials to majority upward a data center, nosotros're still cheaper!" To which I'd say: "Doubtful at best, but irrelevant, anyway."

Irrelevant, because enterprises aren't simply buying raw storage and compute from the public clouds. They're ownership into Amazon Aurora, Google BigTable, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, etc. They're buying services and convenience.

SEE: Why public cloud R&D is making lock-in worse, not better (TechRepublic)

Is that cheap? No, just information technology's demonstrably cheaper, for case, to run big data workloads on public clouds than on dedicated servers. Why? Because the very nature of information science requires elastic infrastructure, as AWS production main Matt Wood told me:

Those that get out and purchase expensive infrastructure find that the problem scope and domain shift really rapidly. By the fourth dimension they become around to answering the original question, the business has moved on. Y'all need an environment that is flexible and allows you to quickly answer to irresolute big data requirements. Your resource mix is continually evolving–if you buy infrastructure, it's almost immediately irrelevant to your concern considering it's frozen in fourth dimension. It's solving a problem you may not have or intendance about whatever more than.

Fifty-fifty if all an enterprise buys from the public cloud is storage and compute, it's going to be price-advantageous compared to bulking up on under-utilized, quickly obsolete servers. But, as mentioned, enterprises are increasingly looking to the cloud for the next phase of convenience, including powerful services they can rent by the hour (or infinitesimal) instead of signing long-term contracts for dumb infrastructure that requires the extra cost (and expertise) of server-side software.

Every bit former VMware executive Mathew Lodge tweeted, the ServerPronto University study "Displays a staggering lack of agreement of the drivers for public cloud." That, or a profound need to keep peddling servers in a earth that increasingly doesn't care. To be articulate, in that location are very expert reasons to run individual clouds, as I've written before, merely saving 3x on infrastructure is not ane of them.