Editing Cloud Homelabs (section)

== Pros and Cons ==
The key benefits to moving to using a cloud homelab are:
* Massive [[WAF]] as the cloud homelab makes no noise, takes up no space and is completely invisible to your partner!
* No big capex investments required for you at home to buy physical kit (such as compute hosts, network switches, NAS arrays, etc. Instead the cost of your homelab is spread across its lifetime
* If you do not need to run some or all of your homelab running 24/7, then the cloud homelab is ideal, as you only pay for it when it's running! If you are a very infrequent labber who doesn't need to do much at the actual hypervisor level, it could indeed be an ideal solution, or at least good enough!
* Taking that a step further, if you don't use your cloud homelab for a few weeks or months, it doesn't cost you a penny!
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* Flexibility and scalability of the cloud means you can spin up very large environments for testing, then blow them away. In your homelab your homelab is limited to your maximum resource capacity.
* The number of features and technologies available in the cloud 
* Licensing is both a pro and a con in the cloud. Certain software you may wish to use may not be compatible with running n multi-tenant compute, but using the licensing built into the cloud platforms mean your licensing is covered automatically (taking Amazon RDS or Azure SQL as perfect examples - SQL licensing is included!). You can even rent some software solutions on an hourly basis, meaning you can fully test some software for as long as you need and only pay a matter of a few pennies to pounds!
Key negatives to using a cloud homelab:
* You have to be very careful to configure the appropriate security and alerting safeguards, to ensure you don't either have your account compromised, or indeed accidentally leave machines running and end up with a huge bill. Setting things like billing alerts can help to mitigate this. Also keeping tight control of your account passwords and keys!
* You don't have that warm fuzzy feeling of doing a local manual install on real tin, and all the potential fiddling and tweaking it sometimes requires (YMMV)
* With the typical internet connection for most folk being asynchronous DSL 2+ (FTTC if you're lucky), upload speeds can make things a bit painful when transferring data and machine images from your home machines.
* Not ideal if you want something which runs multiple machines 24/7 as the costs can spiral.
* Security in general is something you will need to spend a bit more time thinking about if you want to run your homelab in the cloud.