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If you can save money by moving to AWS at its publicly listed prices, your company has absolutely mismanaged its IT infrastructure. You can do 10x cheaper than
by kuschku 9y ago
If you can save money by moving to AWS at its publicly listed prices, your company has absolutely mismanaged its IT infrastructure.
You can do 10x cheaper than AWS easily, if you are willing tomake tradeoffs that AWS just can't make globally for all their customers.
EDIT: If you’re paying silicon valley wages, and target a global audience with your site/product, and can get from AWS something cheaper than the publicly listed prices, then AWS very likely will be a good deal for you. But many companies have different needs than these, and may be able to save money by dropping things they don’t need.
- leonroy 9y agoCare to share on where savings can be made with a DIY approach vs AWS?
- kuschku 9y agoThe largest factor is bandwidth. In the EU you can get bandwidth a factor 100x cheaper in most situations than with AWS. The second factor is levels of abstraction. It's cheaper to run your own virtualization software on rented dedicated hardware than to use EC2, and it's cheaper to run your own kubernetes cluster than to use EKS or GKE. The places where having external companies do it sabes the most is (a) in running the actual hardware and networks and (b) providing a platform for your software (e.g. Google app engine). Taking a bunch of rented dedicated servers and configuring kubernetes is cheaper than renting the computational power through GKE or EKS. But basically yeah, these are the same standard solutions to saving money with hosting that have been pretty much known for decades. EDIT: Be aware, this only applies for the publicly listed prices — if your company can get a deal like Snapchat did with Google, or Netflix with Amazon, then the math may work out entirely different. But I don't know what they pay so I can't comment on that.
- dogma1138 9y agoShow me the DC which will provide bandwidth and collocation cheaper than AWS on a rack basis. Also keep in mind that ever since crypto DCs have a very strict limit on power consumption so there are many more hidden fees now.
- viraptor 9y ago> ever since crypto DCs have a very strict limit on power consumption Has it changed much? I haven't done real hardware in a while, but I remember the rack power to be a very limited resource years ago. (I.e. you could easily pack more hardware in the rack than you'd be allowed to power)
- dogma1138 9y agoWhat changed is that they are now agrresively charge you these days. In London area (city and outskirts like Oxford) its £1500-2000 per 10kw and they count the PSU rating regardless of what you actually use. And that is on paper only as many DCs limit a rack to 20A which gives 4.8kw only so if you need more you need to lease another rack which costs more money. And leasing adjacent racks also isn’t really cheap they usually give you maybe 2-3 ones if you need more than that well then you are now leasing floor space which means if you need say one rack with 15kw rated bare metal you may end up having to lease enough room to hold 10 racks if not more.
- chillydawg 9y agoOxford is not outskirts of London. It's 50 miles of farmland and towns away.
- dogma1138 9y agoOutskirts in this case is anything that is about an hour from the circular but that could be just me.
- ukj 9y agoDoes your model factor in the cost of human time, availability, agility and management complexity? How quickly can you scale up your design 10x? 100x?
- kuschku 9y ago> How quickly can you scale up your design 10x? 100x? Who needs to scale 100x in a matter of hours? For those companies, AWS may be very useful. My entire point is that not everyone needs all the functionality AWS provides, and that’s where you can save the money.
- manigandham 9y agoScaling really isn't that big of a deal. 99.99% of companies do not "scale" very fast at all. Most large deployments are grown organically over months or years. Flexibility is a much bigger factor in using the cloud.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ukj 8y agoIt is one an the same problem - money/time trade-off. Which one is worth more to you? It depends. I've worked at organisations where "get N extra servers" was a 6-8 month process. Because of this you have to be extremely good at capacity planning. And very few organisations are good at these guessing games. Either you over-provision with a generous safety margin; or you don't - and your fail to handle peak loads.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- oblio 9y agoCan’t you just use a CDN and get cheaper bandwidth that way?
- kuschku 9y agoFor static content, of course! But if you have highly dynamic content, that gets quite a bit more complicated.
- edf13 9y agoAgree - bandwidth is the biggest factor by far. This applies to AWS and GCP
- nova22033 9y ago> and it's cheaper to run your own kubernetes cluster than to use EKS That's an interesting data point considering EKS isn't GA yet.
- kuschku 9y agoPremise 1: You can find cheaper hosters than EC2. Now we can make a simple case differentiation: (a) EKS is more expensive than EC2. Due to Premise 1, that means EKS is more expensive than alternative hosters. QED. (b) EKS is cheaper than EC2. Possible, but very unlikely, and I’m betting against this.
- sigi45 9y agoIts sometimes just easier to use AWS instead of finding those people and with those people, you have more dependency on those people. Now with AWS i can manage a whole infrastructre AND write code where you needed an admin team before.
- kuschku 9y agoSure, but that’s always a tradeoff. If you just use EC2, though, you’ll find many other providers of virtual or dedicated servers for rent for much cheaper, with similar performance and reliability. If you’re fully integrated in the AWS ecosystem, it is much more convenient, but also of course more expensive. That said, unless you’re in silicon valley, your hiring costs will be so much lower than amazon’s that even your own admin team might end up cheaper than using Amazon’s.
- Rapzid 9y agoYour avg hire comp may be quite a bit lower outside of the major tech cities, but your still gonna pay a lot for the really good people. You may need less of those people and at a later point with AWS though, depending.
- bpicolo 9y agoJust using EC2 is a corner case. The huge benefit is the wide variety of hosted services you get to take advantage of and not roll on your own.
- matwood 9y ago> You can do 10x cheaper than AWS easily, if you are willing tomake tradeoffs that AWS just can't make globally for all their customers. Are you really replicating AWS or just EC2? How do you replicate S3? Glacier? What about Aurora (DB replication that actually works!). If all I need is raw compute, I can go back to building machines and beat AWS prices but I will have no where near the same level of functionality, flexibility, and now it is up to me to maintain them.
- kuschku 9y agoThat’s the entire point. If you don’t use all the same services, or use them differently, you can make tradeoffs that AWS can’t.
- MBCook 9y agoReally? What if you have an occasionaly peaky load with BIG peaks? You have to keep enough hardware on hand to satisfy that even if it only happens, say, 10% of the time. That’s a lot of wasted infrastructure and time managing it.