5 ms·

I can purchase and then colocate 2x Dell R640s (8c/16t, 64gb of ram, as much NVMe storage as I can stomach) with tier 1 bandwidth billed at the 95th percentile

I can purchase and then colocate 2x Dell R640s (8c/16t, 64gb of ram, as much NVMe storage as I can stomach) with tier 1 bandwidth billed at the 95th percentile and 24/7 remote hands support for about $150/month. The purchase price on the Dells is about $3500/ea. Total first year cost on this setup: $8,800 Total three year cost on this setup: $12,400 2x m5d.4xlarge EC2 instances (this isn't counting ingress/egress rates, or really anything else) First year cost: $15,621 . Total three year cost for the EC2 instance: $46,863.36 For the cost of using EC2 you could hire an extra person to help grow your company. Yes, you can get discounts in AWS for agreeing to a three year term. Yes AWS offers you flexibility to walk away at any time. If you have a base line load (which most companies do) you should really look at colocating your owned equipment. You also get the bonus of being out of the watchful eye of Amazon's profitability team looking to see if they can copy what you're doing.

mping 7y ago
I'm pretty sure colocation is cheaper if you know what you're doing (what to buy, where to colocate, what kind of bandwidth required, etc). I'm also pretty sure a good portion of cloud customers don't know or don't want to risk it.
- solidasparagus 7y ago
  It probably depends what you measure. How do you scale up to a meet a relatively quick increase in demand? Will you lose customers during that time and how does that factor into your costs? I think, at least for some business types, colocation will usually be more expensive because you have to overprovision or risk losing customers.
tills13 7y ago
> For the cost of using EC2 you could hire an extra person to help grow your company. You _will_ be hiring an extra person to manage these machines. That's the beauty of The Cloud (tm). Need more compute? You got it. Provisioned too much? Get rid of it. If you're a startup, you don't have time nor money to be managing your own infra. Not to mention the ability to deploy to _any_ region within minutes. Now you're talking $8,800 / region + someone to maintain other regions. > ingress/egress rates unless you're also using S3 or CloudFront, this doesn't really mean anything. Put a free CDN in-front of S3 or your instances if you're worried about load or cost of IO. > You also get the bonus of being out of the watchful eye of Amazon's profitability team looking to see if they can copy what you're doing Ok now you're reaching.
- shiftpgdn 7y ago
  How much management does a bare metal box need? Nothing more than what an ec2 instance would need. There are colocation providers all over the world. Psychz.net is a great example. My assumption is a single box per region. There is no redundancy in your ec2 systems. You should google the Amazon profitability team if you don't believe me.
  - solidasparagus 7y ago
    I can't find anything related to AWS and "profitability team" on Google. Can you share some info/links?
    - shiftpgdn 7y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734261 Tangentially related: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/ovh-ceo-unlike-amazon-google-we-will-never-be-in-competition-with-you/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/ovh-ceo-unlike-amazo... https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/amazon-literally-stole-my-product-idea-and-took-over-my-listing/323388 https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/amazon-literally-s... https://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/ https://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/ https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/9/19/20874818/amazon-allbirds-shoe-clone-copy-sneaker-206-collective-private-label https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/9/19/20874818/amazon-allb...
- dclusin 7y ago
  Once you get beyond a few instances you'll need a fulltime person to manage your cloud assets anyway. VPC & associated networking + managing different services is not a trivial task. You'll still have an ops team. Whether it's old school sys admins or devops coders is down to your choice of where you run your system.
mullen 7y ago
2x m5d.4xlarge EC2 instances for 3 year no-upfront reserve pricing is $20,813.76 (You should really do that). But what are you getting 2x m5d.4xlarge instances from the get go? Start with the smallest instance size your app will run on and then add them on one at a time? Need to run 10 servers in the day but only 2 at night? Then configure autoscaling to do that. What happens if you need to expand out into another part of the world? Okay, now you just copy your setup to another Region instead of trying to find another provider in another country. What if your service becomes super popular (You got on the front page of HackerNews), with autoscaling, it just grows automatically. No scrambling to get more servers, it just scales. Don't listen to the "Woe is me!" stories about using the Cloud and feel sorry for these companies. They designed poorly, wrote crappy quick code and paid a price for it.
- tuananh 7y ago
  also, spot instance is dead cheap. a reduction of 60-70% in cost is possible with the use of mixed reserved instances and spot instances.

mping 7y ago

I'm pretty sure colocation is cheaper if you know what you're doing (what to buy, where to colocate, what kind of bandwidth required, etc). I'm also pretty sure a good portion of cloud customers don't know or don't want to risk it.

solidasparagus 7y ago
It probably depends what you measure. How do you scale up to a meet a relatively quick increase in demand? Will you lose customers during that time and how does that factor into your costs? I think, at least for some business types, colocation will usually be more expensive because you have to overprovision or risk losing customers.

tills13 7y ago

> For the cost of using EC2 you could hire an extra person to help grow your company. You _will_ be hiring an extra person to manage these machines. That's the beauty of The Cloud (tm). Need more compute? You got it. Provisioned too much? Get rid of it. If you're a startup, you don't have time nor money to be managing your own infra. Not to mention the ability to deploy to _any_ region within minutes. Now you're talking $8,800 / region + someone to maintain other regions. > ingress/egress rates unless you're also using S3 or CloudFront, this doesn't really mean anything. Put a free CDN in-front of S3 or your instances if you're worried about load or cost of IO. > You also get the bonus of being out of the watchful eye of Amazon's profitability team looking to see if they can copy what you're doing Ok now you're reaching.

shiftpgdn 7y ago
How much management does a bare metal box need? Nothing more than what an ec2 instance would need. There are colocation providers all over the world. Psychz.net is a great example. My assumption is a single box per region. There is no redundancy in your ec2 systems. You should google the Amazon profitability team if you don't believe me.
- solidasparagus 7y ago
  I can't find anything related to AWS and "profitability team" on Google. Can you share some info/links?
  - shiftpgdn 7y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734261 Tangentially related: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/ovh-ceo-unlike-amazon-google-we-will-never-be-in-competition-with-you/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/ovh-ceo-unlike-amazo... https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/amazon-literally-stole-my-product-idea-and-took-over-my-listing/323388 https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/amazon-literally-s... https://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/ https://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/ https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/9/19/20874818/amazon-allbirds-shoe-clone-copy-sneaker-206-collective-private-label https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/9/19/20874818/amazon-allb...
dclusin 7y ago
Once you get beyond a few instances you'll need a fulltime person to manage your cloud assets anyway. VPC & associated networking + managing different services is not a trivial task. You'll still have an ops team. Whether it's old school sys admins or devops coders is down to your choice of where you run your system.

mullen 7y ago

2x m5d.4xlarge EC2 instances for 3 year no-upfront reserve pricing is $20,813.76 (You should really do that). But what are you getting 2x m5d.4xlarge instances from the get go? Start with the smallest instance size your app will run on and then add them on one at a time? Need to run 10 servers in the day but only 2 at night? Then configure autoscaling to do that. What happens if you need to expand out into another part of the world? Okay, now you just copy your setup to another Region instead of trying to find another provider in another country. What if your service becomes super popular (You got on the front page of HackerNews), with autoscaling, it just grows automatically. No scrambling to get more servers, it just scales. Don't listen to the "Woe is me!" stories about using the Cloud and feel sorry for these companies. They designed poorly, wrote crappy quick code and paid a price for it.

tuananh 7y ago
also, spot instance is dead cheap. a reduction of 60-70% in cost is possible with the use of mixed reserved instances and spot instances.