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If beating AWS on price is trivial, why is nobody doing that to beat them? The only place I have a gripe on AWS pricing is bandwidth. I keep waiting for the ann

If beating AWS on price is trivial, why is nobody doing that to beat them? The only place I have a gripe on AWS pricing is bandwidth. I keep waiting for the announcement that bandwidth is being cut in half next month and it hasn't happened. I've done the datacenter thing many times and there are so many pieces to the costs of running your own that most people don't include. The biggest one is just plain agility. Predictable workloads can benefit from self-hosted, but then again you can get much better prices at AWS when your loads are predictable as well if you're willing to commit.

mcpherrinm 10y ago
Google's "Custom Machine Types" can be a big pricing win over Amazon if your workload doesn't match Amazon's pre-built options.
vgt 10y ago
Google Cloud has made several big efforts to make cloud pricing cheaper, simpler, and more flexible for its customers: - List Prices are cheaper [-1] - Google Sustained Use Discounts are like RIs but applied automatically and without commitments (up to 30% off if you use a VM for 100% of a month) [0] - Preemptible VMs are a fixed 70-80% off, rather than the uncertain and highly variable Spot Instance Market [1] - Custom Machine Types offer you the ability to set your own CPU/RAM [2] - Both Google and Microsoft offer per-minute pricing - VM sizing recommendations will give you a message when you can save money[3] In the end, Google Cloud can be 40% cheaper than AWS[4] [-1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing [0] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use [1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible [2] https://cloud.google.com/custom-machine-types/ https://cloud.google.com/custom-machine-types/ [3] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/six-Google-Cloud-Platform-features-that-can-save-you-time-and-money.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/six-Google-Clou... [4] http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-google-says-to-aws-price-cuts-our-cloud-is-still-way-cheaper/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-google-says-to-aws-price-c... (disc: work @ Google Cloud)
serge2k 10y ago
> If beating AWS on price is trivial, why is nobody doing that to beat them? They have a huge suite of offerings, good reputation, huge amount of third party tooling, and the services themselves are somewhat sticky. By that I mean, I could probably switch over to your cheaper cloud service. It would mean having my engineers go through and build stuff to fill in the gaps or transition away from things that are very AWS specific. Or I could just pay a bit more money and keep developing features as AWS isn't too expensive and does what I need.
- vidarh 10y ago
  I agree that this makes sense for a lot of people. E.g. I have clients that I recommend use AWS simply because hosting is a small cost item for them and it isn't worth their effort to optimise it for cost (at least not until they grow huge) vs. spending effort elsewhere. Moving to cheaper services quickly becomes a big deal for people with low margins and high infrastructure costs, though, where moving to cheaper infrastructure can make the difference between being able to match competitors on price or not. The key is to understand your hosting needs well enough to know whether or not you can afford to build a dependency on AWS specific services.
vidarh 10y ago
What do you mean why is nobody doing that? Lots of providers are doing that. Almost the only providers in the same price league as AWS are Google Cloud, Azure and Rackspace. All of them appear to assume (rightly so, judging by peoples reaction) that they can keep their margins high on the basis of brand name recognition and specialist features, and none of them seem interested in rocking the boat. They will drop their publicly listed prices once smaller customers gets comfortable enough with cloud services to start seriously shopping around, not before. Larger customers will already negotiate (e.g. I know of one AWS customer with ~75% discount over the listed prices) > The only place I have a gripe on AWS pricing is bandwidth. I keep waiting for the announcement that bandwidth is being cut in half next month and it hasn't happened. AWS bandwidth pricing is 5x-50x higher than the providers I usually use. E.g. for the cost of 1TB of transfer at AWS you can rent a server for a month + multiple TB of transfer elsewhere. Cutting it in half would still leave them ridiculously expensive for bandwidth. > I've done the datacenter thing many times and there are so many pieces to the costs of running your own that most people don't include. The biggest one is just plain agility. Predictable workloads can benefit from self-hosted, but then again you can get much better prices at AWS when your loads are predictable as well if you're willing to commit. I do the datacenter thing every day, and I also do AWS and other cloud providers every day, and when I move customers to dedicated hosting they typically cut their total infrastructure costs to 1/2 or 1/3 vs AWS costs after considering reserved instances and maintenance costs. For many of them, if they were large enough to get serious attention from Amazon they might have been able to negotiate deals that'd make it cost effective to stay, but I've also had more extreme examples, like a customer that cut their hosting cost to 1/10th. The agility argument doesn't fly with me - I manage multiple systems that are hybrid mixes of dedicated predictable loads on self-owned or leased hardware, coupled with cloud resources that are "tied in" via VPNs as needed. With well designed systems, the very availability of cloud makes dedicated hosting cheaper even if you never or rarely use it: Where we before often had to plan for 50% to 100% overcapacity on dedicated hardware to handle spikes (and might still have to just accept that some spikes would slow things down), we can now plan on almost no overcapacity and spin up on-demand instances to take spikes (we need only sufficient overcapacity to react and for additional capacity to come online), or even to shave off the top peaks of daily traffic.
- 10y ago

mcpherrinm 10y ago

Google's "Custom Machine Types" can be a big pricing win over Amazon if your workload doesn't match Amazon's pre-built options.

vgt 10y ago

Google Cloud has made several big efforts to make cloud pricing cheaper, simpler, and more flexible for its customers: - List Prices are cheaper [-1] - Google Sustained Use Discounts are like RIs but applied automatically and without commitments (up to 30% off if you use a VM for 100% of a month) [0] - Preemptible VMs are a fixed 70-80% off, rather than the uncertain and highly variable Spot Instance Market [1] - Custom Machine Types offer you the ability to set your own CPU/RAM [2] - Both Google and Microsoft offer per-minute pricing - VM sizing recommendations will give you a message when you can save money[3] In the end, Google Cloud can be 40% cheaper than AWS[4] [-1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing [0] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use [1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible [2] https://cloud.google.com/custom-machine-types/ https://cloud.google.com/custom-machine-types/ [3] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/six-Google-Cloud-Platform-features-that-can-save-you-time-and-money.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/six-Google-Clou... [4] http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-google-says-to-aws-price-cuts-our-cloud-is-still-way-cheaper/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-google-says-to-aws-price-c... (disc: work @ Google Cloud)

serge2k 10y ago

> If beating AWS on price is trivial, why is nobody doing that to beat them? They have a huge suite of offerings, good reputation, huge amount of third party tooling, and the services themselves are somewhat sticky. By that I mean, I could probably switch over to your cheaper cloud service. It would mean having my engineers go through and build stuff to fill in the gaps or transition away from things that are very AWS specific. Or I could just pay a bit more money and keep developing features as AWS isn't too expensive and does what I need.

vidarh 10y ago
I agree that this makes sense for a lot of people. E.g. I have clients that I recommend use AWS simply because hosting is a small cost item for them and it isn't worth their effort to optimise it for cost (at least not until they grow huge) vs. spending effort elsewhere. Moving to cheaper services quickly becomes a big deal for people with low margins and high infrastructure costs, though, where moving to cheaper infrastructure can make the difference between being able to match competitors on price or not. The key is to understand your hosting needs well enough to know whether or not you can afford to build a dependency on AWS specific services.

vidarh 10y ago

What do you mean why is nobody doing that? Lots of providers are doing that. Almost the only providers in the same price league as AWS are Google Cloud, Azure and Rackspace. All of them appear to assume (rightly so, judging by peoples reaction) that they can keep their margins high on the basis of brand name recognition and specialist features, and none of them seem interested in rocking the boat. They will drop their publicly listed prices once smaller customers gets comfortable enough with cloud services to start seriously shopping around, not before. Larger customers will already negotiate (e.g. I know of one AWS customer with ~75% discount over the listed prices) > The only place I have a gripe on AWS pricing is bandwidth. I keep waiting for the announcement that bandwidth is being cut in half next month and it hasn't happened. AWS bandwidth pricing is 5x-50x higher than the providers I usually use. E.g. for the cost of 1TB of transfer at AWS you can rent a server for a month + multiple TB of transfer elsewhere. Cutting it in half would still leave them ridiculously expensive for bandwidth. > I've done the datacenter thing many times and there are so many pieces to the costs of running your own that most people don't include. The biggest one is just plain agility. Predictable workloads can benefit from self-hosted, but then again you can get much better prices at AWS when your loads are predictable as well if you're willing to commit. I do the datacenter thing every day, and I also do AWS and other cloud providers every day, and when I move customers to dedicated hosting they typically cut their total infrastructure costs to 1/2 or 1/3 vs AWS costs after considering reserved instances and maintenance costs. For many of them, if they were large enough to get serious attention from Amazon they might have been able to negotiate deals that'd make it cost effective to stay, but I've also had more extreme examples, like a customer that cut their hosting cost to 1/10th. The agility argument doesn't fly with me - I manage multiple systems that are hybrid mixes of dedicated predictable loads on self-owned or leased hardware, coupled with cloud resources that are "tied in" via VPNs as needed. With well designed systems, the very availability of cloud makes dedicated hosting cheaper even if you never or rarely use it: Where we before often had to plan for 50% to 100% overcapacity on dedicated hardware to handle spikes (and might still have to just accept that some spikes would slow things down), we can now plan on almost no overcapacity and spin up on-demand instances to take spikes (we need only sufficient overcapacity to react and for additional capacity to come online), or even to shave off the top peaks of daily traffic.

10y ago