3 ms·

One of my old budgets, but there are a ton of blogs out there about it that are easily found via search engine.

StreamBright 7y ago
Ok so nothing concrete. Let me share my anecdotal evidence than with numbers. I have migrated an on-prem cluster of 150 nodes which has hadoop, elasticsearch and docker apps running the UI. We have achieved 30% saving in the year over year budget for the company which is ~600.000 USD. This is not about EC2 vs a Dell server for example in a datacenter because this comparison would be an apple to oranges one. This is the sum of all the costs on-prem vs the sum of all the costs in cloud. When people try to compare purely EC2 to a node running on-prem, the only thing is 100% crystal clear that they do not understand how the cost is structured for a infrastructure. Quite often they forget that we need networking, electricity and cooling in the datacenter. They also forget that datacenter capacity cannot be given back when not needed (auto-scaling) and few minor things. This results in the conclusion that the cloud is more expensive than on-prem which in my experience of moving several fortune 500 to the cloud is not true, quite the opposite, significant cost savings can be achieved.
- bifrost 7y ago
  I was talking about "in a datacenter", but yes, you have almost zero elasticity with datacenter buildouts. You can get metered power but that can be a mixed bag since its usually more expensive per KWH. Most companies that "move to the cloud" also make a lot of changes to the way they do things so they can scale/up down dynamically, thats not an insignificant cost in development time. If you have a static load AWS is really expensive. Also GPU's are still insanely bad to do in AWS/Azure. Lets say you need the equivalent of 60 x p3.16xlarge for a whole year, thats well over a million USD a month. You're breakeven on month 3 in a datacenter even with all the overhead. Maybe some of that is my ability to get good deals, but even if you breakeven on month 4, thats crazytown.
  - StreamBright 7y ago
    >> If you have a static load, AWS is really expensive. Again without details, this a meaningless claim. My own company's only infrastructure is a website that "runs" on AWS using the free tier of Cloudfront and a little bit of the paid tier of S3. This is a static workload. It is really cheap. Without adding all the details on both sides and the workload you cannot claim that AWS (or for that matter any cloud vendor) is more expensive.
    - bifrost 7y ago
      If you can find cases where its cheap, thats great, but its not the case for a lot of people with static compute load. One of my example datacenters is: Private servers, access controlled, etc 12 servers (E5-2438L, 128GB of ram, 6T of RAID in each, 10gbps interconnects/etc) It costs $1200/month to run. Just the storage cost in AWS is around $3k/monthly. The equivalent EC2 cost is around $14k/monthly. It requires around 1-2 hours/month of oversight and the costs are generally fixed except for the bandwidth which is billed at a fraction of the cost of AWS pricing.

Ok so nothing concrete. Let me share my anecdotal evidence than with numbers. I have migrated an on-prem cluster of 150 nodes which has hadoop, elasticsearch and docker apps running the UI. We have achieved 30% saving in the year over year budget for the company which is ~600.000 USD. This is not about EC2 vs a Dell server for example in a datacenter because this comparison would be an apple to oranges one. This is the sum of all the costs on-prem vs the sum of all the costs in cloud. When people try to compare purely EC2 to a node running on-prem, the only thing is 100% crystal clear that they do not understand how the cost is structured for a infrastructure. Quite often they forget that we need networking, electricity and cooling in the datacenter. They also forget that datacenter capacity cannot be given back when not needed (auto-scaling) and few minor things. This results in the conclusion that the cloud is more expensive than on-prem which in my experience of moving several fortune 500 to the cloud is not true, quite the opposite, significant cost savings can be achieved.

bifrost 7y ago
I was talking about "in a datacenter", but yes, you have almost zero elasticity with datacenter buildouts. You can get metered power but that can be a mixed bag since its usually more expensive per KWH. Most companies that "move to the cloud" also make a lot of changes to the way they do things so they can scale/up down dynamically, thats not an insignificant cost in development time. If you have a static load AWS is really expensive. Also GPU's are still insanely bad to do in AWS/Azure. Lets say you need the equivalent of 60 x p3.16xlarge for a whole year, thats well over a million USD a month. You're breakeven on month 3 in a datacenter even with all the overhead. Maybe some of that is my ability to get good deals, but even if you breakeven on month 4, thats crazytown.
- StreamBright 7y ago
  >> If you have a static load, AWS is really expensive. Again without details, this a meaningless claim. My own company's only infrastructure is a website that "runs" on AWS using the free tier of Cloudfront and a little bit of the paid tier of S3. This is a static workload. It is really cheap. Without adding all the details on both sides and the workload you cannot claim that AWS (or for that matter any cloud vendor) is more expensive.
  - bifrost 7y ago
    If you can find cases where its cheap, thats great, but its not the case for a lot of people with static compute load. One of my example datacenters is: Private servers, access controlled, etc 12 servers (E5-2438L, 128GB of ram, 6T of RAID in each, 10gbps interconnects/etc) It costs $1200/month to run. Just the storage cost in AWS is around $3k/monthly. The equivalent EC2 cost is around $14k/monthly. It requires around 1-2 hours/month of oversight and the costs are generally fixed except for the bandwidth which is billed at a fraction of the cost of AWS pricing.