12 ms·

Yes, but only if you pay for three years up front. Spelling out all the options: * $117K / year on-demand * 81K / year for one-year commitment, nothing u

by snewman 10y ago

Yes, but only if you pay for three years up front. Spelling out all the options: * $117K / year on-demand * 81K / year for one-year commitment, nothing up front * 69K / year for one-year commitment, $34,285 up front * 67K / year for one-year commitment, $67,199 up front * 35K / year for three-year commitment, $52,166 up front * 33K / year for three-year commitment, $98,072 up front All these prices are total, e.g. for the last option, you pay $98,072 up front and then nothing more, which divides out to about $33K / year over the three years. Plus, eventually, the spot market, and of course you can run save money with on-demand if you only need the instance occasionally.

hartator 10y ago
AWS pricing is a bit ridiculous. $100,000 can buy some much hardware even while taking account of the additional costs like electricity and hardware failures.
- blowski 10y ago
  And the staff costs of good sysadmins, and the reliable network, and everything else that comes with AWS? For some use cases, the pricing of AWS makes sense.
  - Chronic51 10y ago
    For most personal and business use cases, it does not make sense.
  - throwaway2016a 10y ago
    I tend to agree with you on AWS. I swear by it. But in this case I would probably go at it this way... How many hours can I run the machine before it costs more than building one? Probably a month? (random guess) Will I be running it longer than that? If yes, build the machine, if no, just rent it from AWS. I can't even imagine a scenario where I run this 24 hours a day 365 that I wouldn't build out a Hadoop cluster or similar for.
    - zymhan 10y ago
      Well, the advantage of AWS is that you don't have to run it 24/7 unless your workload requires it.
    - throwaway2016a 10y ago
      Exactly, so say you are running it 3 hours a day every day and it costs x an hour and you want an ROI on your hardware of 3 months. If y is the cost of building it... if 3x * 90 > y build else rent So at $13.338 (assuming no reserved instance) if y is less than $3600 you make your money back in 3 months. Of course a machine with those stats will not be $3600.
      - eloff 10y ago
        Your math is off. At $13.338/hour you're looking at just shy of 10 grand per month ($9763 for a month of 30.5 days.) It looks like one of these bad boys would set you back about $40000. So you'd break even at 4 months. If you're going to go for the 3 year reserved instance, with $100K upfront, you'd be way better off on capex and opex just buying and colocating the thing (not considering other expenses.) The bigger you grow the more the balance tips towards do it yourself because your costs for colocation, managing hardware, etc amortize out better with scale. AWS gets a little better with scale but not nearly as quickly.
        throwaway2016a 10y ago
        My math isn't off... it's for 3 hours a day and I state that in my post (perhaps not clearly enough). Your number is for 24. The point was if you're not full utilization it could make sense.
- gist 10y ago
  People using AWS are not typically, say, small business people looking to eke out savings however possible so they can take an extra vacation or buy an new car. They are corporate people or people running startups using other people's money. Their success or failure doesn't depend on saving the organization money so they are willing to pay more to have less to worry about themselves personally.
  - ckozlowski 10y ago
    Quite the opposite. If you're a small business in need of compute, then it's quite a value. I'll give you a case in point. I have a friend who works for a construction company. He has three servers he's cobbled together all at one site, and a NAS for storage. They provide email and document sharing, accounts management, etc. Every new blueprint that comes through needs to be reviewed for accuracy, but they come in as images, so he has another server that just runs tesseract OCR when he gets a pdf in. He asked me if he should get three servers, or one and virtualize the three. He wanted to plan for growth, but didn't know what that would be. the NAS was underutilized. He's buying no servers. He's setting up Workmail and Workdocs for their users. (Workspaces is an option in the future.) Blueprints are uploaded to S3 as they come in, where the file arrival notification triggers a lambda function that performs an OCR pass on the file and dumps it into a new bucket. Because this function runs on-demand, he avoids paying for a server to sit there, and only pays a few cents for a doc. His other services no longer run on servers he has to manage, so he doesn't worry about patching. He has reliable, off-site backups for the first time and version control, and he only pays for the exact amount of storage he's using as opposed to buying space for his NAS in advance. And he doesn't need to worry about scaling. That story plays out all the time. It's arguably a bigger savings for smaller people who can't afford the upfront costs than large corporations that already are likely to have massive sunk costs in datacenter space and assets. If you're a small business, the moment you go cloud you not only save money, but you gain capabilities (the biggest being in redundancy and reliability, which are the most important...how many small businesses have a DR/COOP capability on-prem?) which you would never have had otherwise.
    - gist 10y ago
      > It's arguably a bigger savings for smaller people who can't afford the upfront costs Well first let me say that I have been doing all of this (as a business person who knows tech and Unix) for quite some time. And what you wrote above spins my head because I don't know much about AWS (but I can easily turn up a server if needed). My point is what you are describing for a small business person requires a tech person knowledgeable with AWS to implement (and keep on top of) which is the "cost" as opposed to perhaps saving money in this particular example for this particular customer. I am no doubting that AWS (which I see you work for in your profile) is good for certain types of uses (such as perhaps the example you are giving). But you still need a knowledgeable tech guy to keep it all working it is not like using webmail vs. running your own email server (imap, smtp etc.) Additionally once you are on AWS you are pretty much locked into AWS by the way (as you describe) things are setup. I am not convinced that at a time in the future AWS will not change their pricing to take advantage of the lock that they have (even though now they continually drop prices). Or add extra fees or whatever. Being in business so many years I have seen this happen and changing from AWS will be near impossible. (In other words for people on AWS such as you describe there is no easy alternative competition for a system once designed and specific to AWS in the way you detail).
- Rezo 10y ago
  The AWS instance is very predictable, in operation and cost, and that's valuable to business. If your unique snowflake in your own datacenter (don't forget to factor in the physical space and your datacenter personel into your costs) doesn't work well, it can mean replacement, additional costs and downtime. If the AWS instance has a hickup, terminate and replace (I'm not saying that's going to be trivial either at a 2TB RAM instance size). A big hunk of hardware of your own also represents significant CapEx and a depreciating asset for business. Spinning this monster up costs you $13 to start testing immediately, and you can walk away from it at any time. That's worth a lot.
  - ckozlowski 10y ago
    "Fail quickly, fail cheaply."
- ckozlowski 10y ago
  It's a lot, yes, but you're getting a lot more than just the instance: - You can back up the image with fantastic reliability and recover into multiple AZs automatically with an autoscaling group for practically peanuts. - You can place that instance into your own private VPC complete with security groups (stateful firewall), Network ACLs, and inter/intra AWS routing. - You get strong authentication and RBAC through IAM over the instance and it's environment. That's what I consider in the "free or nearly free" tier, off hand. The other benefits come with being able to interface seamlessly and quickly (same infrastructure) to the rest of AWS services. You might do better at finding a piece of hardware that does that (and I'm curious now what a 2TB RAM server goes for) but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a way to start from scratch to deploy that instance and all of the services that come with it for under that price. People with on-prem compute likely have some of that already, but the value here is that you could request an X1 today without ever having been a customer before, and you'll get all of that, and access to more, just with that one instance. If that's not a good value proposition today, then I'd say wait just a few months. Today probably marks the highest price anyone will ever see for an X1. Given past history, it's just going to go downhill from here.
  - nucleardog 10y ago
    Also, the common use case of "I don't need this hardware 24/7/365." If you need to do some analysis or computation on a massive data set once a month or something, it's going to be cheaper to pay $5k/yr (assuming you run for 24 hours a month and don't make use of the spot market) than to purchase and maintain the hardware and infrastructure.

by snewman 10y ago

hartator 10y ago

AWS pricing is a bit ridiculous. $100,000 can buy some much hardware even while taking account of the additional costs like electricity and hardware failures.

blowski 10y ago
And the staff costs of good sysadmins, and the reliable network, and everything else that comes with AWS? For some use cases, the pricing of AWS makes sense.
- Chronic51 10y ago
  For most personal and business use cases, it does not make sense.
- throwaway2016a 10y ago
  I tend to agree with you on AWS. I swear by it. But in this case I would probably go at it this way... How many hours can I run the machine before it costs more than building one? Probably a month? (random guess) Will I be running it longer than that? If yes, build the machine, if no, just rent it from AWS. I can't even imagine a scenario where I run this 24 hours a day 365 that I wouldn't build out a Hadoop cluster or similar for.
  - zymhan 10y ago
    Well, the advantage of AWS is that you don't have to run it 24/7 unless your workload requires it.
  - throwaway2016a 10y ago
    Exactly, so say you are running it 3 hours a day every day and it costs x an hour and you want an ROI on your hardware of 3 months. If y is the cost of building it... if 3x * 90 > y build else rent So at $13.338 (assuming no reserved instance) if y is less than $3600 you make your money back in 3 months. Of course a machine with those stats will not be $3600.
    - eloff 10y ago
      Your math is off. At $13.338/hour you're looking at just shy of 10 grand per month ($9763 for a month of 30.5 days.) It looks like one of these bad boys would set you back about $40000. So you'd break even at 4 months. If you're going to go for the 3 year reserved instance, with $100K upfront, you'd be way better off on capex and opex just buying and colocating the thing (not considering other expenses.) The bigger you grow the more the balance tips towards do it yourself because your costs for colocation, managing hardware, etc amortize out better with scale. AWS gets a little better with scale but not nearly as quickly.
      - throwaway2016a 10y ago
        My math isn't off... it's for 3 hours a day and I state that in my post (perhaps not clearly enough). Your number is for 24. The point was if you're not full utilization it could make sense.
gist 10y ago
People using AWS are not typically, say, small business people looking to eke out savings however possible so they can take an extra vacation or buy an new car. They are corporate people or people running startups using other people's money. Their success or failure doesn't depend on saving the organization money so they are willing to pay more to have less to worry about themselves personally.
- ckozlowski 10y ago
  Quite the opposite. If you're a small business in need of compute, then it's quite a value. I'll give you a case in point. I have a friend who works for a construction company. He has three servers he's cobbled together all at one site, and a NAS for storage. They provide email and document sharing, accounts management, etc. Every new blueprint that comes through needs to be reviewed for accuracy, but they come in as images, so he has another server that just runs tesseract OCR when he gets a pdf in. He asked me if he should get three servers, or one and virtualize the three. He wanted to plan for growth, but didn't know what that would be. the NAS was underutilized. He's buying no servers. He's setting up Workmail and Workdocs for their users. (Workspaces is an option in the future.) Blueprints are uploaded to S3 as they come in, where the file arrival notification triggers a lambda function that performs an OCR pass on the file and dumps it into a new bucket. Because this function runs on-demand, he avoids paying for a server to sit there, and only pays a few cents for a doc. His other services no longer run on servers he has to manage, so he doesn't worry about patching. He has reliable, off-site backups for the first time and version control, and he only pays for the exact amount of storage he's using as opposed to buying space for his NAS in advance. And he doesn't need to worry about scaling. That story plays out all the time. It's arguably a bigger savings for smaller people who can't afford the upfront costs than large corporations that already are likely to have massive sunk costs in datacenter space and assets. If you're a small business, the moment you go cloud you not only save money, but you gain capabilities (the biggest being in redundancy and reliability, which are the most important...how many small businesses have a DR/COOP capability on-prem?) which you would never have had otherwise.
  - gist 10y ago
    > It's arguably a bigger savings for smaller people who can't afford the upfront costs Well first let me say that I have been doing all of this (as a business person who knows tech and Unix) for quite some time. And what you wrote above spins my head because I don't know much about AWS (but I can easily turn up a server if needed). My point is what you are describing for a small business person requires a tech person knowledgeable with AWS to implement (and keep on top of) which is the "cost" as opposed to perhaps saving money in this particular example for this particular customer. I am no doubting that AWS (which I see you work for in your profile) is good for certain types of uses (such as perhaps the example you are giving). But you still need a knowledgeable tech guy to keep it all working it is not like using webmail vs. running your own email server (imap, smtp etc.) Additionally once you are on AWS you are pretty much locked into AWS by the way (as you describe) things are setup. I am not convinced that at a time in the future AWS will not change their pricing to take advantage of the lock that they have (even though now they continually drop prices). Or add extra fees or whatever. Being in business so many years I have seen this happen and changing from AWS will be near impossible. (In other words for people on AWS such as you describe there is no easy alternative competition for a system once designed and specific to AWS in the way you detail).
Rezo 10y ago
The AWS instance is very predictable, in operation and cost, and that's valuable to business. If your unique snowflake in your own datacenter (don't forget to factor in the physical space and your datacenter personel into your costs) doesn't work well, it can mean replacement, additional costs and downtime. If the AWS instance has a hickup, terminate and replace (I'm not saying that's going to be trivial either at a 2TB RAM instance size). A big hunk of hardware of your own also represents significant CapEx and a depreciating asset for business. Spinning this monster up costs you $13 to start testing immediately, and you can walk away from it at any time. That's worth a lot.
- ckozlowski 10y ago
  "Fail quickly, fail cheaply."
ckozlowski 10y ago
It's a lot, yes, but you're getting a lot more than just the instance: - You can back up the image with fantastic reliability and recover into multiple AZs automatically with an autoscaling group for practically peanuts. - You can place that instance into your own private VPC complete with security groups (stateful firewall), Network ACLs, and inter/intra AWS routing. - You get strong authentication and RBAC through IAM over the instance and it's environment. That's what I consider in the "free or nearly free" tier, off hand. The other benefits come with being able to interface seamlessly and quickly (same infrastructure) to the rest of AWS services. You might do better at finding a piece of hardware that does that (and I'm curious now what a 2TB RAM server goes for) but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a way to start from scratch to deploy that instance and all of the services that come with it for under that price. People with on-prem compute likely have some of that already, but the value here is that you could request an X1 today without ever having been a customer before, and you'll get all of that, and access to more, just with that one instance. If that's not a good value proposition today, then I'd say wait just a few months. Today probably marks the highest price anyone will ever see for an X1. Given past history, it's just going to go downhill from here.
- nucleardog 10y ago
  Also, the common use case of "I don't need this hardware 24/7/365." If you need to do some analysis or computation on a massive data set once a month or something, it's going to be cheaper to pay $5k/yr (assuming you run for 24 hours a month and don't make use of the spot market) than to purchase and maintain the hardware and infrastructure.