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Because the cloud has economies of scale and benefits from specialization (cheaper power, bulk buying prices, remote land prices, etc) Hence, some of these sa

by yazr 8y ago

Because the cloud has economies of scale and benefits from specialization (cheaper power, bulk buying prices, remote land prices, etc) Hence, some of these saving should be passed on to consumers and it should be cheaper. The counter argument is that the cloud is over-engineered (redundancy, backups, better software) for enterprise customers. You u are paying for all these benefits whether u want to or not.

maltalex 8y ago
Most companies you rent stuff from enjoy the benefit of scale. Car rental companies operate cars at a lower cost than the average car owner. Still, “owning X” and “getting a working X for a while at a time and place most convenient to you” are two different services.
vidarh 8y ago
There are two distinct problems with that: One is that AWS (and Azure and Google) are taking advantage of their brand recognition and are pricing their services extremely high compared to their competition. For some that is worth it as they need services they don't get elsewhere, but for a lot of people there are far cheaper cloud services out there. Sometimes even hybrid solutions (e.g. a particular problem with AWS are the absolutely insane bandwidth prices - if you "need" to store your data on S3 because they're the only ones you trust for durability or because it fits in with other parts of your workflow - but you access most objects regularly enough from outside AWS that bandwidth prices are a high part of your cost, for example, it can often pay to rent servers somewhere like Hetzner just to act as caches) The other problem is that while it looks straightforward, as much as we might like to think so, servers are not as much of a commodity as we'd like to think. Components are. The really big savings in running your own comes when you measure how much RAM you need and what CPU you need, and whether or not disk IO is an issue, and configure servers that fit your use better. If the cloud providers have instances that fit your needs, awesome, you can get a decent price (if you shop around). If they don't, you can easily end up paying a lot for components in your instances that you don't need. When you don't know what you need, it might be ok to pay that premium, but as soon as you know what you need, there are many cases where buying your own allows you a degree of specialisation that does not pay for the cloud providers because it's better to provide a smaller range where they can get economy of scale. I've seen cases where e.g. being able to shove enough RAM in a server cut costs by 90% or more vs. splitting the load over multiple lower RAM cloud instances. I'm not saying it will stay this way forever - there are certainly regularly more and more combinations that you can find decently priced cloud instances for - but there are still tons of cases where building your own (or having someone configure one for you) is so much cheaper that it's nearly crazy not to.
swebs 8y ago
I've seen just the opposite. A VPS from a cloud provider is often 2-3x the cost of an equivalent Linode.
- desdiv 8y ago
  I think your pricing information might be slightly out of date. AWS Lightsail's $5 plan is equivalent or better than Linode's $5 plan. Plus AWS Lightsail has an even more barebones plan at $3.5 per month. Two years ago you would be perfectly correct. The cheapest AWS option back then would be a micro EC2 instance at around $20 per month IIRC.
  - tyingq 8y ago
    Does Lightsail still throttle CPU heavily? https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_no_match_for_10_vps_from_linode_do_vultr https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_...
  - _hyn3 8y ago
    Lightsail is basically a toy to compete with Vultr/DO/OVH/etc. You can't even rename a server or change its metadata. You can't resize a server (except for taking a snapshot and building a new server). Essentially, you can't make any changes to a server and there are zero tools for organizing, tagging, or even adding a description field. Of course, you cannot manage Lightsail instances using the AWS console (or even see them). All of the powerful AWS tools are invisible to you as well, and your entire Lightsail infrastructure is invisible from within AWS itself (except for the bill). Lightsail is really great for personal sandbox servers, or for moving to AWS on the cheap, but it's not even as capable as its worst competitor (and certainly cuts out a lot of features compared to real AWS.) The worst part is probably the surprising and seemingly minor factor of being able to simply rename or resize a server. This makes using it in a team or production environment surprisingly difficult. With that all said, I still find Lightsail very useful for small prototyping and other fast jobs (or a Lambda replacement -- it's way cheaper than running any reasonably busy Lambda function), but I can't see using it for real production usage. Your best bet for real production usage, or something that will someday move into production, would be probably vultr/DO/linode. (OVH really wants to be great, and it should be because the hardware is really great, but the dashboard and billing are so bizarrely bad..) AWS is good when you have a virtually unlimited budget or don't mind running up the bill while you're getting rolling, but getting locked into AWS will mean that you are stuck with it forever. It's very hard to migrate away if you start using a vendor-specific thing like DynamoDB (to be fair, Google Firebase has exactly the same issue; Instances are basically fungible, but proprietary data stores are not)
Const-me 8y ago
> the cloud has economies of scale and benefits from specialization For GPUs it's the opposite. With some legal BS, NVidia forbids Amazon to rent out GeForces. Doesn't look OK to me, I don't think NVidia has a right to deside how people will use the hardware they have bought. Anyway, Amazon has to buy Teslas, and Teslas are 10 times more expensive.

by yazr 8y ago

maltalex 8y ago

Most companies you rent stuff from enjoy the benefit of scale. Car rental companies operate cars at a lower cost than the average car owner. Still, “owning X” and “getting a working X for a while at a time and place most convenient to you” are two different services.

vidarh 8y ago

There are two distinct problems with that: One is that AWS (and Azure and Google) are taking advantage of their brand recognition and are pricing their services extremely high compared to their competition. For some that is worth it as they need services they don't get elsewhere, but for a lot of people there are far cheaper cloud services out there. Sometimes even hybrid solutions (e.g. a particular problem with AWS are the absolutely insane bandwidth prices - if you "need" to store your data on S3 because they're the only ones you trust for durability or because it fits in with other parts of your workflow - but you access most objects regularly enough from outside AWS that bandwidth prices are a high part of your cost, for example, it can often pay to rent servers somewhere like Hetzner just to act as caches) The other problem is that while it looks straightforward, as much as we might like to think so, servers are not as much of a commodity as we'd like to think. Components are. The really big savings in running your own comes when you measure how much RAM you need and what CPU you need, and whether or not disk IO is an issue, and configure servers that fit your use better. If the cloud providers have instances that fit your needs, awesome, you can get a decent price (if you shop around). If they don't, you can easily end up paying a lot for components in your instances that you don't need. When you don't know what you need, it might be ok to pay that premium, but as soon as you know what you need, there are many cases where buying your own allows you a degree of specialisation that does not pay for the cloud providers because it's better to provide a smaller range where they can get economy of scale. I've seen cases where e.g. being able to shove enough RAM in a server cut costs by 90% or more vs. splitting the load over multiple lower RAM cloud instances. I'm not saying it will stay this way forever - there are certainly regularly more and more combinations that you can find decently priced cloud instances for - but there are still tons of cases where building your own (or having someone configure one for you) is so much cheaper that it's nearly crazy not to.

swebs 8y ago

I've seen just the opposite. A VPS from a cloud provider is often 2-3x the cost of an equivalent Linode.

desdiv 8y ago
I think your pricing information might be slightly out of date. AWS Lightsail's $5 plan is equivalent or better than Linode's $5 plan. Plus AWS Lightsail has an even more barebones plan at $3.5 per month. Two years ago you would be perfectly correct. The cheapest AWS option back then would be a micro EC2 instance at around $20 per month IIRC.
- tyingq 8y ago
  Does Lightsail still throttle CPU heavily? https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_no_match_for_10_vps_from_linode_do_vultr https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_...
- _hyn3 8y ago
  Lightsail is basically a toy to compete with Vultr/DO/OVH/etc. You can't even rename a server or change its metadata. You can't resize a server (except for taking a snapshot and building a new server). Essentially, you can't make any changes to a server and there are zero tools for organizing, tagging, or even adding a description field. Of course, you cannot manage Lightsail instances using the AWS console (or even see them). All of the powerful AWS tools are invisible to you as well, and your entire Lightsail infrastructure is invisible from within AWS itself (except for the bill). Lightsail is really great for personal sandbox servers, or for moving to AWS on the cheap, but it's not even as capable as its worst competitor (and certainly cuts out a lot of features compared to real AWS.) The worst part is probably the surprising and seemingly minor factor of being able to simply rename or resize a server. This makes using it in a team or production environment surprisingly difficult. With that all said, I still find Lightsail very useful for small prototyping and other fast jobs (or a Lambda replacement -- it's way cheaper than running any reasonably busy Lambda function), but I can't see using it for real production usage. Your best bet for real production usage, or something that will someday move into production, would be probably vultr/DO/linode. (OVH really wants to be great, and it should be because the hardware is really great, but the dashboard and billing are so bizarrely bad..) AWS is good when you have a virtually unlimited budget or don't mind running up the bill while you're getting rolling, but getting locked into AWS will mean that you are stuck with it forever. It's very hard to migrate away if you start using a vendor-specific thing like DynamoDB (to be fair, Google Firebase has exactly the same issue; Instances are basically fungible, but proprietary data stores are not)

Const-me 8y ago

> the cloud has economies of scale and benefits from specialization For GPUs it's the opposite. With some legal BS, NVidia forbids Amazon to rent out GeForces. Doesn't look OK to me, I don't think NVidia has a right to deside how people will use the hardware they have bought. Anyway, Amazon has to buy Teslas, and Teslas are 10 times more expensive.