Capex versus Opex
| CapEx (Capital Expenditure) | OpEx (Operating Expenses) |
|---|---|
| Long lead times for new equipment; significant staff integration effort required | On-demand services designed for plug and play |
| Equipment failures | Automated instance health maintenance |
| Overprovisioning/wasted capacity | Buy/rent only what you need, use metrics to resize on-the-fly |
| HVAC, electricity, facility, rental insurances | None of these are required |
| Low-value maintenance staff required | Service provider maintains H/W |
| Contracts lock you into 1 approach | Adopt new approaches as skills and services allow |
| Configuration efforts can be costly and difficult to remediate | Software-defined services are easily reconfigured and deliver repeatable results |
| New initiatives undergo a slow, rigid provisioning process | Stand up or replace assets as you need them |
| Significant monitoring tooling investment, with limited automation | Monitoring and alerting built into service |
| TCO contains many hidden charges | TCO is completely transparent |
| Financing includes debt service | Significant pricing breaks quantities and prepayment |
