was the comparison based on on-demand instances or reserved instances? we reserve almost all of our instances within our company for 3 years and also get an extra discount on top of it. based on my calculations, i've seen AWS cheapest out of all. would like to know if i'm missing anything
This was a few years ago so prices have changed on both sides. What I advocate is doing exactly what you did: do a comparison with actual numbers and performance stats instead of hand waving that the cloud is always best.
another factor that gets overlooked some is on-hand skills and hireable skills.
if you have experience (and/or your team does) with dedicated, that should probably be for a non-trivial in decision making. likewise if you have more aws/cloud experience (or have those skills available on staff), there's benefits to that.
cloud skills don't magically happen - someone with minimal AWS skills can provide you with a setup that is more expensive to run, and possibly more insecure than a locked down dedicated box.
Exactly. If you have expertise to run your own servers, and you don't have a spiky workload, maybe it's worth it. If you have cloud expertise, that may be the winner.
