With cloud gaming pioneer OnLive officially dead, the list of options for those looking to play games on remote hardware is suddenly much narrower. The idea behind cloud gaming is that users can play AAA titles on older hardware, an ideal solution in the event you can't afford (or simply don't want) to spend hundreds of bucks on new hardware.
Despite its shortcomings, Larry Gadea was an avid OnLive user and knew that he'd want a similar experience once the service shuts down on April 30. The solution he came up with is absolutely brilliant and can be replicated by nearly anyone under the right circumstances.
Using Amazon EC2 and Steam's In-Home Streaming, Gadea has essentially created his own personal cloud gaming platform. Factoring in the cost of a GPU Spot instance (around $0.11 an hour) and the cost of data transfer (roughly $0.09 per gigabyte which at a sustained ~10Mbit, will cost around $0.41 per hour), the total cost of operation works out to around $0.52 per hour.
That may seem like a lot but if you consider the cost of a new gaming PC to be $1,000, you can get just over 1,900 hours of cloud service for the same price (plus you don't have to fork over all the money at once). The only catch is that you'll need a fast Internet connection (that's unmetered) and you need to live within 20ms of an AWS datacenter with GPU instances (you can test your ping times by clicking here).
If you're interested in trying this for yourself, head over to Gadea's blog to get the details. The setup process seems a bit complicated but he has an excellent tutorial that you can follow.