> nice historical graphs for hardware pricing that are publicly accessible

Even then, that's only half the comparison, though. Do you know of anyone keeping historical AWS prices? That would seem more likely, actually, than a reliable pc-parts database.

> I mean, x86 hardware is... x86 hardware. Dell vs. HP vs. supermicro- it mostly even uses the same chipsets, and most of the cost is the cpu/ram, so there's really not a lot of difference in who you buy from, as long as you get quotes from more than one vendor.

Noooo.. no you too! :)

I find that this is true, but only if the workload is primarily CPU- and RAM-bound. My sense is that somewhere between the dot-com boom and now (500x increase in speed?) CPUs got fast enough, and software got parallel enough, that the challenge in scaling shifted CPU capacity to I/O. (More RAM always seems to help, but I agree there's not much differentiation there).

As such, at any given point in time, each vendor's offering at a particular (otherwise competitive) price point might not make sense. The mobo might not have enough PCIe slots with enough lanes (or too many on too few slots). The onboard 10GE might use a chipset that performs poorly under OpenBSD. The chassis might hold comically few disks (ahem, Dell) or have no SAS expander backplane option.

The other differentiator, is at the high end, for >2S systems. It's arguably no longer "commodity" hardware, but the parts are more similar than different, and there's no lock-in if one can wait at least the full release cycle. Still, it's rare that anyone is brave enough to buck the trend and pay the 2x-4x price premium to scale "up" before embarking on the engineering nightmare that is scaling "out" (which I'm not convinced has any less of a hardware price premium, just that it can grow without bound).

> Blade servers for "efficency"

I've never understood that mass delusion, either, though at least not there do exist high-power-density datacenters that can house them. I assume someone managed to spread the myth that it's space that's expensive at a datacenter, rather than power and cooling.

> I'm not aware of any similar traps in the market right now

I'm not, either, at this very moment, but every time I've looked, out of curiosity, there's something like that. All the vendors will have at least one product that seems objectively worse in every way to the older products, including being more proprietary, that I wonder if it isn't some custom design that flopped that they're trying to dump.

>My personal theory as to the lack of cost concern in "cloud" is that times are hot.

Agreed. Easy money, be it from VCs, low interest rates, and/or a booming economy (perhaps fueled by the first two) helps explain it.

> Setting up openstack is a huge pain in the ass,

Is that really the go-to option? I'd think there are much lighter-weight alternatives. I'd have thought provisioning the base infrastructure were much less a PITA than writing the "infrastructure as code" which one has to do even for public cloud.

> growing pains for the next six months,

Is it really that long? Or is that just the perception?

> if your team is really good.

Maybe that's the problem. Good help is hard to find?

Still, what about 1-2 years down the line of making hay at those 5x costs? There are plenty of companies like that and, at some point, it has to at least be slightly tempting to go through the effort, including hiring. Maybe the money really is too easy.

> My personal theory is that this trend will reverse with the next downturn.

I've been thinking the same thing, but I'm wondering what will happen with all that excess capacity that cloud providers are suddenly left holding.

> Meanwhile, I'm working for other people, which is pretty nice in a lot of ways, even though it does feel sad that all the time I spent in managing x86 hardware is something people just don't care about anymore.

I've always worked for other people (which also makes me worry about too strong a downturn), and the hardware management has only been a part of what I do.

I'm not so much sad at the apathy toward one of my skills. It's more that I'm so limited in how much performance I can squeeze out of the infrastructure or how low I can keep the cost. It makes for weird tension.