With a floor like this

After some review I've determined that the cost of moving the build environment to the cloud is just too high.  Here's the conclusion of my research:

AWS

Because meeting the specific needs of the build environment would require a dedicated host on AWS the cost becomes prohibitive almost immediately.  The least expensive option (the compute-optimized c4 dedicated host) alone would cost between 37k and 72k over six years before paying for storage or bandwidth.

Azure

Azure is in a similar situation.  Their compute-focused VM instances start at about $100 a month each meaning that even keeping one active over six years would top $3.7k.   Running 8 VMs and a single SQL Server for that period tops $32k before even paying for persistent storage or bandwidth.

Local

Either option proposed for a local alternative is considerably less expensive than the cloud-based options and would represent gigantic performance upgrade over the existing solution.  In addition the process of transitioning would be considerably less complex. 

At this point I recommend keeping the build environment in house at this time. 

Which is sad in the sense that I was excited about the prospect of a cloud deploy but that's just not really feasible with the requirements of this particular location.  

It's good, though, in that I'm still on track to do a migration and that's very exciting. I've requested a new server with:

A 10-core hyper-threaded processor 

32 GB RAM

2x300 GB SAS Drives for an OS (RAID 1)

2x2 TB SAS Drives for VM storage and file sharing

Whether I get all that or not is yet to be determined but I'm excited to get started on the next phase of the project. 

Spent a good part of today documenting CMD scripts.  Many of them are usually called by an ASP application but by reading through and documenting their command line parameters they won't always have to be.

I've got a pretty good sense of the existing hardware and what they'll need moving forward but understanding cloud pricing is it's own magic science.

First day jitters

First day out in the wider world and I'm starting to fell like I might be figuring out what's going on.

The goal is to have everything migrated either on to new hardware or AWS in the very near future so I spent the day poking at two different servers and looking at what will need to be migrated.  One poor machine had five active VMs on just four cores (and more, just waiting to stand up).

Read some CMD files and felt the syntax coming right back like it was yesterday when I was furiously trying to figure out the right commands to just get my freaking video game to work back in Windows 95.  Had a self-indulgent 'kids these days' moment.

I can't wait to see what they've got for me tomorrow.