Why not use the cloud?

When it comes to hosting a lab, there is one question which is very basic, very urgent and very obvious: can we do this in the cloud?

It does not matter much, if the company you work for has a cloud-first attitude or it is your personal choice to prefer a cloud environment over traditional hosting solutions. From a technical perspective, I love cloud hosting. The well (ok, well enough) documented APIs and scripting commands allow to flexibly build up and configure a lot of things that might still need manual intervention or using GUIs in traditional hosting approaches.

But the main drawback as I found out in several approaches of cloud hosting over the years, is the cost this solutions incurs. While a single machine, especially the burstable  types like B2ms (my secret favorite) come with less than 10 Euro-cent per hour, they amount up to 60 Euro if left running for a full month, including one SSD
So that will be 60 Euro for 2 CPU, 8 GB memory and a 64 GB disk.

If you can clever calculate and spin the lab up on demand, that sounds cheap, but you still do not have snapshots, backups, traffic, custom templates etc in the calculation - one of my nightmares is getting an oversized invoice from Microsoft because a script went berserk or failed to stop the lab properly.

For the same 60 Euro you can get a decent hosting hardware with traditional hosters like www.hetzner.com and STILL add the occasional cloud machinery to it, on demand, as needed. Just tether it using a site-to-site VPN and keep an eye on the cost. But your "main" VMs might run on the flatrate of your traditionally hosted lab.

Peace of mind at an affordable price while having all the cloud temptations still in arm's reach.