I offload to AWS too for personal stuff, but is there a way for a company or organization to manage a team of developers spinning up new instances for testing/compilation/etc.? The costs of that could be very variable, depending on the instance type and nature and frequency of work it's used for.
We have a single LTSP server for the office which everybody works on. It's a 12-core, 44GB server with about 1TB of platters in various configurations attached. I think it cost around $8000 all in.
We do a lot of VM spinning, and it's a fantastic way to do that sort of work, plus managing a single server is much less overhead than managing 6 workstations.
