I think that’s the same answer someone would say about an IBM mainframe in 1990. And just as wrong.
I’ll use my stupid hobby home server stuff as an example. I tossed the old VMware box years ago. You know what I use now? Little HP t6x0 thin clients. They are crappy little x86 SoCs with m2 slots, up to 32GB memory and they can be purchased used for $40. They aren’t fast, but perform better than the cheaper AWS and GCP instances.
In that a trivial use case? Absolutely. Now move from $30 to about $2000. Buy a Mac Mini. It’s a powerful arm soc with ridiculously fast storage and performance. Probably more compute than a small/mid size company computer room a few years ago and more performant than a $1M SAN a decade ago.
6G will bring 10gig cellular.
Hyperscalers datacenters are the mainframe of 2025.
A hyperscaler (or a cloud providers in general) does not only sell you compute in terms of a compute node but rather in compute as a service. There are some value adds, like e.g., AWS cloud services, but on a pure compute level you pay for elasticity and reliability. A comparison between a cloud provider and your homelab also needs to account for connectivity, which likely is in strong favor (latency/ reliability) of a cloud provider or DC compared to a office or home.
Server hardware is reliable. For connectivity price-wise I think the sweet spot presently is to host own hardware in the data center and have a system administrator that lives not far away. I worked before for a company that was doing things like that while having millions of active users. It costed them at least 5 times less then it would be with a cloud provider. And then when they got a better deal with another data center the migration was not much more complex then moving server boxes in a van and changing ip addresses for load balancers.
Absolutely — they add a ton of value. So did IBM… and companies migrated to NT solutions that were half baked because they were cheap.
When I can get the equivalent of a Mac Mini in a super cheap price point… you’re going to have opportunities to attack those stratospheric cloud margins.
Sorry I was imprecise. I typically buy the cheapest one I can find with a power supply. Last year t630 were the sweet spot. They typically ship with 4 or 8… the windows models have higher spec. I picked up a couple of t730s too. I add third party memory and storage if needed.
You get a super capable, low power device in the price footprint of a raspberry pie.
I’ll use my stupid hobby home server stuff as an example. I tossed the old VMware box years ago. You know what I use now? Little HP t6x0 thin clients. They are crappy little x86 SoCs with m2 slots, up to 32GB memory and they can be purchased used for $40. They aren’t fast, but perform better than the cheaper AWS and GCP instances.
In that a trivial use case? Absolutely. Now move from $30 to about $2000. Buy a Mac Mini. It’s a powerful arm soc with ridiculously fast storage and performance. Probably more compute than a small/mid size company computer room a few years ago and more performant than a $1M SAN a decade ago.
6G will bring 10gig cellular.
Hyperscalers datacenters are the mainframe of 2025.