Denny Cherry explains the value of his having physical hardware on hand:
Now you may be asking why don’t we just do all this in Azure? And we could, but the reason we didn’t is pretty straight forward. Cost. Building tons of VMs in Azure and leaving them running for a few weeks for customers can cost a decent amount pretty quickly, even with smaller VMs. Here our cost is fixed. As long as we don’t need another power circuit (we can probably triple the number of servers before that becomes an issue) the cost is fixed. And if we need more power that’s not all that much per month to add on.
All and all, this will make a really nice resource for our customers to take advantage of, and give us a place to play with whatever we want without spending anything.
Ah, the life-long struggle between cap-x and op-x…