22 ms·

The Amazon Premium

370 points by elorant 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
altacc 7y ago
It’s simplistic but there’s value in having such basic comparisons as the offerings differ for more complex use cases. If anything, I imagine basic comparisons will underestimate cost differences once the ancillary charges are taken into account. I can’t be the only one who’s seen organisations surprised by their cloud costs after migration and then struggle to reduce costs.
samx18 7y ago
I don't agree with the pricing comparison, it is factually incorrect. For instance the digital ocean equivalent in AWS would not be an EC2 but a similarly sized light sail instance which is $40/monthly flat. There are also other factors like region, on demand vs reservations that are ignored.
michaelt 7y ago
I suspect some of the premium is because "nobody ever got fired for buying AWS" If you chose AWS and there's a security incident or hours-long outage, well, some of the best in the industry experienced the same thing, what can you do? Whereas if you chose Linode and they had exactly the same incident justly or otherwise, people might question your choice of a cut price $10/month provider.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Definitely the case at my company. A while ago we did an evaluation of different cloud providers and hosting solutions but it was pretty clear that “AWS” was the only acceptable answer. Which is probably ok. If you don’t have much experience in that space AWS is probably the reasonable and safe way to go.
- jacurtis 7y ago
  This is why a company i worked at about 3 years ago switched to AWS. I suggested using Digital Ocean and argued that we didn't need the complexity of AWS. But the CEO (who is so tech-illiterate that he struggles to send basic email, I am not even joking) has heard that everyone else uses AWS, so he wanted to use it too. Nobody was going to stop this guy from switching over to AWS. He wanted his company to rank among the cool kids that was built on AWS. He had heard of AWS and he trusts Amazon. He has never heard of Digital Ocean. His un-warranted opinion on switching to AWS was not worth fighting, so I let him switch as he desired. If any problem had ever come up with Digital Ocean, he would have pointed fingers at me and said "this wouldn't have happened with AWS, because they are AMAZON!". And thus is why one small company dumps $1,000 a month into AWS when it could dump about $250 a month into Digital Ocean for comparable results. I know these are small numbers for many people on here, but it is a good illustration. For what its worth. I was able to justify getting an AWS Certification because of this, which has been surprisingly helpful to have on my resume, even with companies that don't use AWS. It seems to be a fairly respected certification that demonstrates knowledge of cloud computing in general.
  - draw_down 7y ago
    I just don't see the point of getting worked up about that money, especially if the CEO is fine with it.
  - spookthesunset 7y ago
    Dude, even for a small company the difference between $1000/mo and $250/mo is peanuts.
    - wpietri 7y ago
      Maybe. But the decision heuristic here, which is "we pay 4x more for things because the CEO doesn't trust his people and like to micromanage things" can easily be fatal.
      - spookthesunset 7y ago
        The company paid $1 instead of a quarter. Why the original poster even put up a fight about saving 750 dollars.... can't tell you. They probably spent more on keeping the kitchen stocked with coffee and soda each month.
kugelblitz 7y ago
The reason I use AWS is because I can be fairly certain, that their uptime is quite high (not 100%, but it's more than I can probably guarantee if I were to run on an own server), that their eco-system is huge and they connect to each other. Being a "solo hacker" developing multiple websites, I need to prioritize where I put my time in. Thus my "default" choice is using Elastic Beanstalk to deploy websites, be it PHP, Python or something else. I can easily add environment variables, let it connect to RDS (database), scale it up (more servers or bigger servers), I can add SSL certificates, I can add a CDN (Cloudfront), I can add separate data storage (S3) all with a few clicks and from one (albeit super-huge and need-to-get-used-to) dashboard. Alternatives: I don't trust Google services for anything critical (they tend to shut down easily or they might just change their pricing drastically - e.g. in Google Maps), Azure might be an alternative, just never had the time to check it out intensively. For "fixed ceiling" projects, I use Digital Ocean (because unfortunately AWS mostly doesn't offer a budget ceiling, just alarms).
- anaganisk 7y ago
  Checkout Lightsail, been using it past 6 months. Power and freedom of digital ocean in AWS ecosystem.
  - kugelblitz 7y ago
    Thanks! I had taken a look when it first launched, but haven't looked at it since. Will try it out for the next (low-risk) project.
  - maest 7y ago
    And none of the cost control.
  - pixelperfect 7y ago
    Looks like you get charged if you go over the transfer allowance. Is there a way to automatically shut everything down to prevent that from happening? I like to go months without thinking about my server, knowing there's no way for a bot army to come around and ramp up my charges. I realize that's paranoid, but Amazon's competitors give me that option.
mmahemoff 7y ago
There's really no controversy that AWS, Azure, and GCP are substantially more expensive than bare metal providers, if you're simply comparing machine specs. So if all you're doing is setting up root access and handling everything yourself, then yes, you're throwing huge wads of cash down the toilet with those platforms versus renting a VPS on Linode, Digital Ocean, etc. The economic disparity can flip, though, if you use these services as they're intended. i.e., take advantage of features that are charged incrementally and optimise to reduce how much they're activated per user transaction, where "user transaction" is a key user action such as a page serve or a reported being emailed. The costs can be much lower when you're only using what you need, and not paying for large capacity to be sitting around in case of a peak usage moment. And even more so when you consider there are automatic upgrades and ops to ensure high availability.
- blissofbeing 7y ago
  Easier said than done. To implement that I will probably need to hire a DevOps guy, and now we have all this cloud formation (or whatever your infra as code choice is) code to manage now. So in reality it probably costs more (devops and more code to manage) than if I just went with a couple cheaper bare metal servers. If you are running in the cloud then you still need a devops guy same as you would if you where bare metal. In fact you will probably need _more_ devops people the deeper you get into the AWS ecosystem.
  - weberc2 7y ago
    What are you comparing? If you’re comparing a large, HA SaaS use case with a static website on a VPS, then of course the latter requires less DevOps work, but if you hold the use cases equivalent, AWS requires much less DevOps work than bare metal. Notably, just because you’re using bare metal doesn’t mean the motivation for infra-as-code goes away; to the contrary, you need more of it because you’re now managing more services that come out-of-the box on AWS.
    - xraystyle 7y ago
      Your static site would still probably be better on AWS. Whack it into an S3 bucket, put cloudfront in front of it, and you have a globally scalable, CDN-enabled static site with at least five 9's of reliability and it costs you peanuts.
leesalminen 7y ago
I wonder why the author is comparing AWS t3a.large to GCP n2-standard-2. It’s not an apples to apples comparison as t3a runs on AMD while n2 runs on Intel silicon.
sciurus 7y ago
The effective monthly price for that t3a.large (excluding storage) can vary from $55 to $25 depending on how much you're willing to commit in advance. See the chart at https://ibb.co/M7nnMvL https://ibb.co/M7nnMvL for some different scenarios.
ekvilibrist 7y ago
When comparing virtual machine and ephemeral block storage you're kind of missing the point of AWS "value" for me. It's the deep integration to other services. So yeah DO are perfectly fine if I just need that VPS and a few S3 buckets, but if I need managed Redis? Or something like SSM for managing secrets? Or a managed Elastic search instance?
- chucky_z 7y ago
  Redis themselves offer a managed service. There's https://www.envkey.com/ https://www.envkey.com/ and several alternatives. Elasticsearch offers 3 completely different tiers of support and offerings. Everyone going to AWS is going there for an AWS-like experience. As someone who runs pretty big workloads on AWS, you still very much need the help when you get to a certain scale, and there is a ton of value in just buying a support contract from Elastic or Redislabs, even when using their managed services or running it on an ec2.
NicoJuicy 7y ago
Meanwhile I have a 64GB DDR5, 512SSD and 4 TB 7200 RPM hard drive, Ryzen ( 2700 - 8 core @3,2Ghz) for 900$ as a docker host kicking cloud butt. Indeed, I don't need global-wide services though. But it's more than enough for my localized SAAS. I'll probably add some PI4's in a cluster and experiment with that ( eg. Hosting 2 message brokers instead of one) or the elastic search that requires 1,5 GB RAM ( I'm not sure yet), since I don't want that in the same server.
- samsquire 7y ago
  I've got a 128GB RAM 32 core Threadripper. It purrs.
- ansible 7y ago
  This is an apples and oranges comparison. You are using commercial-grade hardware, with no ECC RAM and other server-grade features. You are also missing RAID, the UPS power supply and generator backup, as well as redundant Internet connections to different Tier-1 providers.
  - sudosysgen 7y ago
    Ryzen threadripper supports ECC memory actually. And most server grade features you could think about.
    - ansible 7y ago
      Yes, but you still have to buy it. Server-grade ECC memory is slower and more expensive than what people typically put in their desktop machines.
  - NicoJuicy 7y ago
    I don't care about ECC https://blog.codinghorror.com/to-ecc-or-not-to-ecc/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/to-ecc-or-not-to-ecc/ I had hardware raid 5 before and it failed, because I used similar hard drives ( 3 drives failed within a month, wasn't expecting that). Working on redundant deployment though ;) -- My quote still stands as I said it
jrockway 7y ago
To some extent, all of these things start looking even more expensive when you realize that you're buying burstable CPU that you aren't allowed to fully utilize. At least with Amazon's t3 instance class, you are assigned "burst credits" which you accumulate by not using the CPU and consume by using the CPU. So you are paying $70 per month for "2 CPUs" but you do not get 5184000 cpu seconds / month, you get significantly less. Digital Ocean, at least, is the same for those cheap instances though I'm not sure how they dole out CPU credits (I think they yolo it and you cross your fingers that you're not sharing a physical machine with the guy doing video transcoding and CI builds). Both Amazon and Digital Ocean do have dedicated CPU instance types. The prices will make your eyes water. (I have not used the other cloud providers, so I don't know what they're up to.) Obviously selling CPU on a time-sharing basis is a good idea; most customers aren't maxing out their CPU 24/7, and this lets them pack more customers into fewer machines. (RAM is the killer, though, and you'll see that at every cloud provider, RAM is really what you pay for.) But when you compare these prices to what a CPU costs... it starts to make you think. My last job really warmed me up to the idea of just running my own servers. All our workloads were containers running in Kubernetes. With Kubernetes, I don't care about individual computers anymore. If one malfunctions, workloads can be easily moved to another computer. All the machine setup work is made machine readable by building containers and authoring Deployment objects, so there is no mental investment in a particular computer or disk image that you get from logging in, installing Debian, screwing around with files in /etc for an hour, etc. Basically, any sort of maintenance involved with physical computers no longer concerned me; repairing a hardware failure basically meant just repairing that hardware failure at my leisure and then moving on. Combined with this was the fact that we were an ISP, so we had a datacenter, power, networking, and all that the floor below our office. I eventually convinced myself that for a month worth of AWS fees, we could have 10x the computing resources and 10x the bandwidth for a one-time cost. Nobody was motivated to hand over the credit card and let me build the cluster... but for me, running dedicated servers went from "thing that only Google does" to "why isn't everyone doing this!?" It's just not that expensive. And, consumer-grade hardware is really good these days. I drooled over the fast builds we got from a c5.4xlarge AWS instance. A consumer Threadripper build would blow that out of the water for about the cost of 6 months of AWS. (Amazon pays the Intel tax. You don't have to, though.)
miniman1337 7y ago
This isnt a useful comparison, Normal S3 has 6 copies, whereas some of the others have only 3. The Durability of S3 standard is 11 9's
- cbg0 7y ago
  That S3 durability isn't really guaranteed by an SLA, it's just "designed" for 99.999999999% durability, but if you don't get that - too bad, I guess? To be fair, other providers also don't really offer an SLA on their durability.
  - miniman1337 7y ago
    My point is that S3 is significantly more durable than the "OVH" type object storage in the posters comparison.
bszupnick 7y ago
This couldn't have come at a better time for me. I'm trying to migrate off of Heroku and my default was to AWS, but this definitely gave me more options. One advantage of AWS is that there seems to often be free AWS credits thrown around. It's hard to compare and quantify that, but something I'm aware of.
p0rkbelly 7y ago
There are lots of apples to oranges here. You can't compare say a Linode or Digital Ocean to an AWS/Azure. One of boxes for experimentation may make sense, I would not run prod though. Also, have you seen the network performance of the smaller providers? (obviously that comes at a cheaper cost too)
Roark66 7y ago
It is true that AWS is expensive considering cost of raw hardware resources. However, it is also true that it is very easy to create many kinds of apps and their support is not bad. For example using their "serverless" stuff (lambda, api gateway, static hosting in S3 and cloudfront) it is very easy to make apps with hosting cost almost perfectly matching the number of users so the only upfront capital expenditure is dev time. Another thing that is very easy on AWS is micro service apps (geographically distributed or not) consuming their managed services such as elasticache etc. Finally, automated deployments (allowing for continuous development/continuous integration if one wishes to use it) are also easy to implement quickly... The price one pays for it is vendor lock in. I wrote many mini-non-mission-critical apps to run on AWS, but I would think twice about putting my main business app in AWS without (costly)backup. I imagine that for startups it might make sense to create their initial product on AWS and when the product takes off spend some of first revenue making it cloud agnostic. The benefit of AWS is that a startup can implement a proof of concept quickly without having to worry about managing their own elastic search for example, and once it proves viable effort can be added to escape vendor-lock-in.
- scarface74 7y ago
  You’re always locked into your infrastructure at a certain scale. All the time you waste trying to avoid lock in, you could be using to actually deliver value to customers. Even if you are just running a bunch of EC2 instances the pain of transitioning your workload and data usually isn’t worth it.
itake 7y ago
DO is famous for randomly deleting customer data. They probably should not be included on this list.
packetlag 7y ago
This entire article is flawed. The true value add of cloud services (AWS, etc) is that you no longer have to pay for disk jockeys to run a data center. To play games with refreshing hundreds or thousands of pieces of bare metal every 3-4 years [EDIT] is to doom your company to crushing O&M. If you've never done Datacenter operations, then you're missing a giant point that eliminating an entire department of expensive technical people is a huge gain long term.
- eloisant 7y ago
  He is comparing big tech cloud to smaller hosting companies, like DigitalOcean and OVH, not to "run your own machines in your own data centers." He is talking about virtual machines.
- shiftpgdn 7y ago
  You didn't read the article at all, did you?
  - packetlag 7y ago
    Read it enough to consider his primise was flawed and to judge the article as such. Running other "cloud" providers on-prem is not a recommended unless you're in Gov or Financial. [EDIT] Comparing the other cloud providers is totally a valid exercise. Just disagree with the wording of his/her approach
    - vxNsr 7y ago
      He's not suggesting doing anything on-prem.
      - packetlag 7y ago
        I stand corrected.
        ska 7y ago
mark_l_watson 7y ago
Yes OVH and DO are much cheaper, I have used both. I retired this year, last job was engineering manager at Capital One (managed deep learning team, I had little to do with infrastructure). At large scale, AWS is a good choice because of the capable security roles that they support. Not a perfect system, but when a large corporation wants to go all in on cloud deployment, AWS is a reasonable choice. Personally, I really appreciate getting a free GCP micro instance that usually hosts two semi permanent web demos. Before I bought a good at-home GPU system, GCP was a good option for spinning up instances for machine learning runs, but Azure and AWS is also good for this. If I were trying to spin up a startup business, I probably would use DO or OVH with a hot smaller backup always running that I could switch DNS settings for rollover - but not nearly as robust as multiple availability zones with one of the expensive cloud providers.
Nican 7y ago
This is not even talked about: One of the biggest cost of cloud is also bandwidth. Usually at about $0.10/GB of outbound transfer.
- gwern 7y ago
  He includes a pointed link at the end to the Twitter of the AI Dungeon 2 guy - who discovered the hard way that when you have a popular app which involves downloading 6GB every time a new user shows up (or an old user, for that matter), you quickly hit $10k/day bills.
  - Nican 7y ago
    Oh wow- I had not looked at that in detail. TLDR: Guy puts free game online, and is charged $0.30 for every download, raking up a $10k bill.
paulgerhardt 7y ago
The nice thing about choosing Linode is you don’t have to wait for a security incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10999397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10999397
SeanFerree 7y ago
Great article!
hodder 7y ago
"I do appreciate the youthful incredulity of thinking you can save us a million dollars a year by pointing to a hard-drive rack . It’s good to question the fundamentals! And we’ve done just that. Spreadsheets up the wazoo. We don’t spend a million dollars with glee. But you can try to cut corners on redundancy and availability, and then you can see how much leniency your customers will show you when you lose their files and have to explain yourself. I’m the one who has to say sorry! So I have to be able to look at our setup and believe we did everything possible to keep our customer’s data safe, and then some. This is that." -DHH https://m.signalvnoise.com/only-15-of-the-basecamp-operations-budget-is-spent-on-ruby/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/only-15-of-the-basecamp-operation...
mdasen 7y ago
The comparison on the Google compute instances is a bit iffy. First, why are we looking at Google's N2 instances rather than N1 instances? The N1 instance would be $52 rather than $61, but the author hasn't talked about why they selected the more expensive N2 instances. Given that competitors don't talk about the CPUs they're using, it seems weird to select the more expensive CPUs for Google. Second, Google offers dedicated hyper-threads. The author says that cloud providers (like Google) are more expensive, but they've compared dedicated hyper-threads on Google with shared hyper-threads on Digital Ocean. DO offers an 8GB 2 vCPU (2 dedicated hyper-thread) instance for $60/mo, but the author is using the 8GB instance with shared CPU for $40/mo. So, with storage, Google costs about $52 while DO costs $60 for an equivalent instance. Linode's $60 8GB dedicated vCPU instance does come with 4 cores so it seems like a better value. One can also argue that the included transfer on Digital Ocean offers $8 in value. However, the premium for the instances alone isn't as big for Google. In fact, google seems cheaper. Now, it's probably a fair comparison for Amazon's instance which only gives you CPU credits for around a third of the time. Google's automatic sustained-use discounts and dedicated hyper-threads make it really competitive with Digital Ocean (if you don't need a lot of bandwidth) as long as you're doing an apples-to-apples comparison. DO's over-sold CPU instances will be cheaper because you're getting less. If DO didn't offer dedicated hyper-thread instances, maybe you could claim that they were equivalent. But DO literally sells something more equivalent for $60 rather than $40. EDIT: Also, OVH is a bad comparison. OVH is cheap, but inconsistent in their product offerings. The author notes that they offer hosted DB services, but that's only in France. Their US, Canada, Singapore, Germany, Poland, and Australia locations don't offer that. Their US website is missing pricing on many of the things they seem to offer. Plus, at a certain point, when you're trusting someone with your datastore, you want a high level of certainty. OVH's website doesn't inspire confidence given how much seems like someone didn't even check it. It's certainly cheap, but it seems cheap for a reason. One final thought: I'm surprised the author hasn't talked about transfer pricing. Cloud providers usually charge a bundle while others charge a lot less. 1 cent per GB at Digital Ocean is a lot less than the 9 cents per GB at AWS. AWS even charges 1 cent per GB for data transfer between AZs in the same region. If you're running a compute and Kafka cluster in 2 AZs, then writing 1GB to a quorum of 3 servers means paying 1.5 cents per GB written (assuming that half the time you're writing to 2 servers outside your AZ and half the time you're writing to one server outside your AZ). Likewise, when you go to read it, if half the time you're not reading from a local AZ, you're paying half-a-cent per GB to read the data. So processing 1GB costs 2 cents. That adds up fast. Everyone compares things like compute instances and seems to ignore data transfer costs. Frankly, Google is competitive on storage and compute costs with places like DO. However, if you are trying to create the next Imgur, you probably care more about transfer costs than compute or storage costs.
thayne 7y ago
It seems like this is assuming something like a simple webserver without HA requirements, but doesn't explicitly state that assumption. There is no mention of reliability or SLAs.
jahrichie 7y ago
I'm no AWS fanboy, and sure its not the cheapest out there, but this is assuming that all cloud providers provide the same level of services for their machines, which is a complete joke. There are OS, Software, security, ease of tools, even speed of scale considerations that have more to do with why 90% of the internet is on AWS lol. There's a reason the only approved government cloud for years has been AWS. Also, heads up, AWS also offers far more services than ALL of those other providers you mentioned. So when you actually start running a real ONLINE business, and need ETL, MUTLI-AZ, WHAREHOUSEING, AUTOSCALE, S3, ETC, all those things talk to each other out of the box and your vendor list doesn't go from 1 to 50.
- hurricanetc 7y ago
  I think the point is that many AWS customers aren’t doing all of that and still assume they are saving money. I would finger in the wind guess that a majority of AWS customers are just renting servers and storage and not even scratching the surface of the usefulness of the platform. Just my guess.
  - asdfman123 7y ago
    Sure they aren't, but they don't want it to be a big hassle when it turns out a few years later, they actually need those features. My employer is okay with paying an extra $10k/mo for stability and predictability.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    We don’t assume we are saving money. We are a smallish B2B company. We are far more concerned with being able to scale up when a new client can increase our load (and revenue) noticeably. The money we save by not having someone babysitting infrastructure and the speed we can move at is well worth it. One client contract basically pays our entire infrastructure bill and then some and we have 30 clients. If we had to hire one Devops person it would be about the same as our yearly bill if not slightly more.
- birdyrooster 7y ago
  Why bother locking in when Kubernetes operators and resources can deploy and maintain the lifecycle of common services? Why would I want some old, forked version of elasticsearch (for example) when I can have the latest version automatically provisioned and scaled with high availability? What is the AWS value add as Kubernetes operators become mature? They own datacenter space and have contracts for power and internet.
zywx 7y ago
This is not an ultra fair comparaison since Amazon has huge discount when you signed up for a year for example. Not to mention spot instances... But yes OVH has a lot to offer and got my preference too. But I am French and it is a French success!
- bgroins 7y ago
  Yeah this is an extremely limited use case with very few data points. It doesn't take into account corporate discounts, spot instances, reserved instances, savings gained from replatforming/rearchitecting to *aaS options. The author here must have very limited enterprise cloud experience.
  - tomerico 7y ago
    Part of this point is that Amazon / Google / Microsoft pricing is intentionally complex, which at the end of the day leads to surprise / higher costs
diyseguy 7y ago
What I wish is that someone would make a blog post that shows you just how much you can realistically do while staying under the "free" tier limits and what innocent "mistakes" will take you over the line into regrettably expensive monthly bill
- diyseguy 7y ago
  Also, I wonder why Amazon hasn't gotten into the ad platform business? They've gotten into everyone else's business. Isn't that the dream - to host a website on their platform and have it be self-supported via ads and possibly even profitable?
quirkot 7y ago
No one ever got fired for choosing IBM... i mean AWS
- asdfman123 7y ago
  It might be CYA in action. However, risk has real cost. Risk of needing more than the little guys provide, risk of them disappearing or the service not keeping up with the times. For some people, the risk way outweighs the extra hosting cost.
code4tee 7y ago
The premium, and highly profitable, market leader is more expensive than other offerings that are trying to play catch-up on market share. This is not exactly a groundbreaking or unknown finding. BMWs also cost more then Fiat’s Also, AWS has become the new IBM and as they used to say “nobody gets fired for choosing IBM.” In the current market if you choose something other than AWS people will question your decision if something goes wrong.
- sudosysgen 7y ago
  OVH is older than AWS and profitable as it is.
kube-system 7y ago
Ignoring that this really isn't an accurate comparison of TCO or performance, this really isn't surprising to anyone who has experience working with enterprise sales. Specs alone will rarely win a sale. Intangibles still have a lot of worth in the b2b space.
hitekker 7y ago
The top comment here rebutts this article from a business perspective: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21313816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21313816
mharroun 7y ago
As someone who's worked at many startups and look at this from that point of view. Here are my key points: - What makes aws great is NOT ec2... it's the ALB, route53, ecs/eks/fargate, redshift, rds, lambda, SQS, Kinesis, cloudwatch, cloudfront... ect. The last startup I was at our production MySql got corrupted... glad I paid for RDS and had their 5 minute interval backups to s3 that required 1 click. - Nearly everyone is on aws, if aws is down the internet is down. The down time from aws is often hand waved away. - With aws I have access to 3rd party services like snowflake and databricks. Hiring and training talent is more expensive then ease of use services. - The cost to performance ratio had always been worth it for every startup* I worked at (double given aws gives baiscly a free year when you raise a round of vc funding). Its costly to dedicate staff/time to infrastructure. I had a real time data pipeline up in under 2 hrs using kensis and imply. Just having to set up somthing like kafka alone will take a multiplitude longer. *The exception being the startup that did billions of requests a day... I doubt they regretting paying aws to get to that point after 6ish years.
- kortilla 7y ago
  > Nearly everyone is on aws, if aws is down the internet is down. The down time from aws is often hand waved away. This is not even close to true. The 3rd answer has some numbers for you: https://www.quora.com/How-essential-is-AWS-to-the-internet https://www.quora.com/How-essential-is-AWS-to-the-internet You’ll notice that the most dramatic responses come from other AWS devs like yourself (the first answer in the quora link). This is because as an AWS devotee you end up in an echo chamber.
  - mharroun 7y ago
    In my experience its true. When S3 went down my companies systems started malfunctioning, as well as many other vendors/system all over the internet including things like slack. Our customers were experiencing pain from multiple vendor failures. When our customers cant order lunch, run trello, or sent chat messages on slack they blame "the internet". Note:I take offence to being called an AWS devotee, I have been in this space professionally for going on 13 years with nearly all of it in the startup space. The early years had to rely on collocation. To see startups struggle from things like hardware failure and delaying sales because they need more hardware is something I do not fondly remember.
all_blue_chucks 7y ago
News flash: elastic pricing is not optimal for static workloads.
continuational 7y ago
Hetzner, less than €10: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=ot https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=ot
scarejunba 7y ago
Ad pixel servers. Literally go from 1x to 4x at peak. If we had to pay for 4x all the time, it wouldn't be feasible. And then add in that feeding through the managed technologies allows you to build lots of product with small teams means it's a no brainer.
kohanz 7y ago
While I appreciate the analysis, the perspective this whole blog post takes misses the mark on how AWS provides value. You can't look at it simply as providing commodity computation and storage. As a solo SAAS founder, I use AWS because of all the other services that surround those offerings (Cognito for user management, DynamoDB for database, Serverless stack for API, SES, SQS, Route53, ECS, I could go on for a while) provide a huge amount of value for me in terms of not having to fully set up and maintain that functionality myself. I pay next to nothing for these services and the developer and devops hours saved is worth many thousands of $ to me. However, because of this reliance, I then end up knowingly overpaying for storage, computation, and bandwidth (the latter is by far the biggest concern, the former 2 are fairly minor, so I'm looking at alternative CDN providers). However, other than that, even though my AWS bill is the biggest my SAAS has, I happily pay it. There would be almost no way for me to run this thing solo without it (I'm not saying someone else couldn't, just for me).
jweather 7y ago
My favorite use case for AWS is being able to spin up temporary resources for rendering, video transcoding, or lab testing, and then shut them back down after a few hours. Likewise I can see a huge win for cyclical traffic loads in only paying for what you use, and in being able to scale up on a dime. Comparing it to a monthly $x/mo provider isn't a fair comparison.
- sudosysgen 7y ago
  What you're doing is probably much more expensive in the long run than buying a GPU or using a dedicated rendering service.
g9yuayon 7y ago
Sometimes it's all about priority. I can't speak for the author and I don't know what the author needs, but my experience tells me, again and again, using cloud services is all about productivity, and people tend to underestimate the cost of lost productivity and missing opportunities. I'll give two examples. Netflix focused on productivity. They even popularized the phrase "undifferentiated heavy lifting". They were able to build a metric system, in less than a year, that supported full OLAP query with practically arbitrary number of dimensions. The system ingested > 20 billion data points per minute, ran on more than a thousand machines, and did not set quota to any team or service. The entire system was built and operated by merely three engineers. This was simply not possible without AWS. Similarly, Netflix's data pipeline, Elasticsearch cluster, and Druid clusters were developed and operated by two engineers. They were oncall 24x7, yet they rarely got waken up in the middle of a night. You think this was possible if Netflix tried to build its own infrastructure? The counter example is Uber. Uber was ambitious and wanted to build everything. The results? More than 200 alerts got fired within 2 hours -- the poor oncall engineer couldn't do anything but to keep ack'ing the alerts. Wanted to use Cassandra? 10-page forms that were more tedious than applying for the Ivy schools, weeks of waits, lots of angry emails, countless meetings, and still no Cassandra instances. Wanted to add 50 machines to your ES cluster? PPTs, meetings, escalation all the way to CTO, and weeks of planning. Want to try out Apache Kudu? No way, because our container-based EC2-like system did not support persistent volume, let alone something similar to EBS or EFS. Wanted to use container for your ES cluster? Same answer. Wanted to create your bespoke cluster topology? Same answer because apparently custom network configuration was not supported. After waiting for more than three years? Same answer. If this was not expensive, I don't know what was. So, you asked if you should save a few thousand bucks a month for your fast-growing company?
blantonl 7y ago
I often see these comparisons done to try to discredit the use of cloud computing resources, often comparing single cloud entities to bare metal one-for-one comparisons. But that's now how compute is delivered in projects any more. The value isn't on the box, it's on the platform. I'm personally about to bolt together a solution that will need to scale significantly, that uses complex message queuing, enormous amounts of object storage, expose set of APIs, and require a highly available distributed document store. And I'm going to personally do it by myself without having to hire 14 SMEs across each of the domains. The value isn't in a cheaper linux server, or less expensive bandwidth. The value is me being able to develop a solution from the ground up by bolting together Web services, Amazon S3, SNS/SQS, Lambda and DynamoDB from a menu of integrated services all by myself. Period.
- kortilla 7y ago
  > The value isn't in a cheaper linux server, or less expensive bandwidth. The value is me being able to develop a solution from the ground up by bolting together Web services, Amazon S3, SNS/SQS, Lambda and DynamoDB from a menu of integrated services all by myself. Period. Cool. It sounds like money doesn’t matter to you because you’ve identified a really high margin business and time to market is critical. This doesn’t match how 99% of businesses work though.
  - bduerst 7y ago
    Precisely. APIs and ubiquitous services across providers has made multi-cloud possible.
    - spookthesunset 7y ago
      Multi-cloud is a stupid idea. You absolutely should get locked into a single cloud vendor and leverage the shit out of everything they offer. Somebody else said it best. People go to the cloud not to escape the hardware, it is to escape all the people who administrate the hardware. Truer words have never been spoken. Escaping all the gatekeepers of traditional setups adds significant value to a company.
echelon 7y ago
Are there any reasons for going bare metal today? Does it lead to competitive advantage in some scenarios? Imagine if Netflix or Twitch were founded today - two businesses with demanding media-hosting needs. Would they be better if they used Amazon infra or built out their own data centers and CDNs? I'm really curious about this because I'd like to get into the space and I'm mulling over bare metal as a competitive advantage vs a barrier to scaling. I've seen how difficult it is to provision and upgrade machines. At the same time, if you were to make it to scale, it seems like having the bare metal and the talent to manage it puts the ball back in your court. Am I wrong?
- bobobooey 7y ago
  Seems like something you wouldn't want to maintain, especially on day 1. It's always something that can be built and transfer over to after the business has grown and developed.
- takeda 7y ago
  You mentioned Netflix, they did started with their own data centers eventually they moved their website to AWS, but all the heavy lifting is still happening through their caching servers that they send to ISPs[1]. [1] https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
- drkrab 7y ago
  Netflix only uses amazon for the “control plane” - ie the “web app” you’re navigating when using the Netflix app. The actual delivery of media happens via their own CDN (of bare-metal servers.)
fooster 7y ago
I've run substantial systems (200+ node operations) on OVH and it was completely unreliable. The hardware kept breaking down, the internal network was terrible, and the support was terrible. Sometimes some backhoe would cut the network connection and cause a 12 hour outage (ok, over 3 years only twice). It was also was inelastic, and provisioning was slow. So if I needed new hardware there could be considerable lead time required. We also tried Heztner, Linode and others. They were all bad in their own unique ways. With AWS, and GCP, yes it is more expensive and also have their own set of problems but nowhere near the same scale as these other providers. Yes if you are running a 1-2 machine setup, who cares. If you are running a professional organisation where you cannot reasonably have downtime without customers screaming, don't go for the cheap stuff.
- privateSFacct 7y ago
  This - some of remember the MULTIPLE CONTROL PLANE takeovers at these third rate places. Seriously - root access on the control plane - that was then covered up. You really are going to build your business there? There is a reason AWS can charge the premium. I quickly learned my lession in linode at least!
- freedomben 7y ago
  I haven't used OVH a whole lot, but it's my go-to for small stuff because it's such a good value for the price. I have spun up a lot of instances on AWS and OVH now, and haven't noticed a speed difference. In fact OVH seem faster. Are you talking about VM instances or something else that takes a while to provision?
angry_octet 7y ago
In some ways you just can't compare, i.e., Cloud Formation and software defined infrastructure is a completely new way of architecting services, but if you're doing more than serving web pages, anything data heavy, the storage and egress costs are incredibly high. Consider the costs of a rack of Supermicro thumpers (90 bays https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/chassis/4U/946/SC946ED-R2KJBOD https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/chassis/4U/946/SC946E...) for long term large online storage vs AWS. Even using Glacier (which is cached tape) is expensive in comparison, especially when read/egress costs are included. Even if you use more enterprisey gear from Dell it is MUCH cheaper to DIY or pay an independent integrator than to use AWS. AWS itself it doing this for even cheaper than what white box gear sells to retail, because of their huge scale and integration efficiencies. There is a reason AWS makes so much money.
NewEntryHN 7y ago
There is no mention of uptime or SLA.
werber 7y ago
I’m a front end developer For work and more and more aws experience is explicitly asked for, I feel like I have no choice but to use their services for personal projects just so I can honestly say I have that experience.
raviolo 7y ago
Ironically, the per-terabyte price to buy HDD storage these days is roughly equal to what Amazon charges for object storage per month. Source: Amazon store ;)
- Eikon 7y ago
  This is not ironic as it's absolutely not relevant. The HDD that you buy is not redundant, don't provide more than a very limited throughput, is not distributed across multiple geographic areas, is not connected to the internet, comes without any of the hardware to make it spin and is not benefiting from s3 APIs as far as I know. You are comparing the costs of buying gas vs the costs actually associated with driving.
WatchDog 7y ago
Given that AWS operates at an unprecedented scale yet still seems to charge a premium over smaller operators, can someone explain why their operating margin[0] of ~25% seems relatively small in comparison to what one might expect? Is this simply because they reinvest a lot of their revenue into product development, or are they much less efficient than they might be able to be? [0] https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazoncom-announces-third-quarter-sales-24-700-billion https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...
- adventured 7y ago
  > their operating margin[0] of ~25% seems relatively small in comparison to what one might expect? Your setup premise is too constrained, you only provide two possible answers. One, they reinvest a lot; two, they're much less efficient than someone (who?) expects. The third one is that you're wrong about how much margin is in the business to begin with. The smaller operators are barely surviving at break-even or worse. Companies like Linode and DigitalOcean are not printing large profit margins. DigitalOcean has been a money losing operation (growing via hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital and debt, plausibly self-sustaining some day when they decide to pull back on spending expansion vs growth... maybe). So the premium that Amazon is charging is precisely what is responsible for them comparatively printing money with a ~25% operating margin. It's not the other way around, such that their margin should be up at 50% if they were run properly as a business. It's something close to remarkable that they have a 25% operating profit margin (and are consistently so profitable), it's the envy of the entire cloud industry.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    Also why they can safely drop prices if someone else eats their lunch.
aeturnum 7y ago
I think this is a nice little piece (though as others have said - not exactly breaking new ground) and I just wanted to add something to this: > "Smaller providers cannot operate at my yottabyte scale" I used to work at a company, now closed, that at one point was the #2 or #3 user of S3 in the world. We were not a big company and the fact that we were inexorably bound to Amazon was a harbinger of our doom. That we were too large for most solutions and that we had become trapped on one provider was a sign of our poor decisions and our inability to think laterally and, effectively, do anything other than digging straight down. I raise this because I think that, if you ever find yourself thinking you're too big for a small provider, I think you should treat that fact as an existential threat to your company. Either you build your own hardware setup or you break up how you do things so you can use smaller companies (even if you chose not to). All the tooling and learning you do to fragment, migrate and validate your data will be invaluable.
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  Or you just use a cloud provider, which will be able to scale well beyond whatever your company grows to. > All the tooling and learning you do to fragment, migrate and validate your data will be invaluable. Too bad this learning has absolutely nothing to do with 99% of any business out there. It adds zero value to the company. In fact, it is a net negative because the company could be doing anything but learning something like that. Opportunity cost is a real cost.
Aeolun 7y ago
When people choose AWS, they do not need only virtual machines. They need the whole range of products that AWS has to offer, and that range is huge.
petethepig 7y ago
Your average AWS and Digital Ocean customers have very different needs. Hence different feature sets and different pricing. Running a simple Wordpress blog on AWS is just as stupid as running a 1000 instance cluster on Digital Ocean. Also, why don't you compare Digital Ocean to Amazon Lightsail? Or spot instances? You can often get those for 1/10 of on-demand price.
robbya 7y ago
This should include some data transfer and associated costs. Some of the services the services listed include a certain amount of bandwidth in the listed price, while others don't.
miguelmota 7y ago
In the long run you could save 50% or more if using reserved instances on AWS.
whatsmyusername 7y ago
I immediately disregarded the authors opinion when they put OVH in the same league as major cloud providers. OVH is a source of nothing but spam/malware/outright malicious traffic from our perspective. We have a job that automatically updates an AWS WAF IP blacklist with their ASN ranges from BGP. We don't want their business or their customers business.
gamedna 7y ago
This is a good start. What would have made this article compelling is a performance vs price comparison. cpu, iops, network, etc. extra credit for sampling a statistically significant number of vms across multiple regions and availability zones per provider.
sbr464 7y ago
I think this argument/comparison warrants including the pricing of purchasing a hands on rack from a data center directly. A full 1Gbps up/down cost about $200/mo, plus ~$150/mo for the managed fiber run. A full locked rack is around 800-1,200$/month. You can load up 40U worth of Dell R730xd, or R740xd (dell outlet). Throw in a few enterprise HP 10g fiber switches (refurbished). You will quickly start to crush any cloud pricing. But you need IT/VMWare experience. Keep in mind that a cpu/core on AWS or GCP is a fraction of an actual cpu/core. It’s a spot representation of an x cpu from some arbitrary time way back when. Even if their specs say differently, try running a job on a 2x cpu machine vs 2x cpu on dedicated hardware.
- nhumrich 7y ago
  Cloud computing is cheaper, not because its actually cheaper, but because of elasticity. If you dont need elasticity, then yes, colo will always be cheaper. If you are in the cloud you should be autoscaling, as that is the main premise of why the cloud took over, and why the cloud can save you money. Only pay for what you need right now That being said, if you can actually plan well enough in the future for colo, you can also pay 3 years in advanced for aws reserved, and pay significantly less than these prices.
  - sbr464 7y ago
    I completely agree. I only mentioned because the article included providers that don’t include the same level of ecosystem benefits, which seems slightly unfair (from a CTO/board decision perspective). I think including a baseline colo option gives insight. Also, purchasing Dell R7xx hardware, from our experience, has almost 100% uptime at scale, over the past 10+ years, confidently running a 3yr machine 5-7 yrs easily.
jakobmi 7y ago
One more idea: "$BIG_TECH will still exist in 10 or 20 years."
jakobmi 7y ago
According to the results, shouldn't the title be "The Microsoft Premium"?
jakobmi 7y ago
One more idea: "$BIG_TECH has huge developer economies-of-scale". Whenever I or one of our devs has a problem with AWS or configuration, there's a 99% probability that anyone had this problem before and I find high quality google search results. That's not the case for OVH, Digital Ocean, ... With developer salaries at 350'000 USD/year, you can now calculate the massive amount of savings.
danial 7y ago
Good luck trying to get a host with 192GB RAM on OVH. It takes days for the host to be provisioned and you have to fill out forms and provide identification. On AWS if I want to run a model that requires a lot of RAM (or compute, or whatever) I can have it up and running in minutes without thinking too much about it. Yes, I pay a premium, but the experience is just superior to anything the value hosting services provide. I find the same to be true for the most part in Azure as well. I'm happy seeing this comparison, however. It gives me a good sense of just how much of a premium I'm paying. Thanks for doing this.
kexx 7y ago
You buy a shoe: $50, you buy a shoe exactly the same quality, but it's a nike: $120. Cloud is exactly the same kind of product than anything else
Hnrobert42 7y ago
Sentence 1: Amazon is probably the largest cloud services company in the world. Probably? Back button where art thou.

370 points by elorant 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

It’s simplistic but there’s value in having such basic comparisons as the offerings differ for more complex use cases. If anything, I imagine basic comparisons will underestimate cost differences once the ancillary charges are taken into account. I can’t be the only one who’s seen organisations surprised by their cloud costs after migration and then struggle to reduce costs.

samx18 7y ago

I don't agree with the pricing comparison, it is factually incorrect. For instance the digital ocean equivalent in AWS would not be an EC2 but a similarly sized light sail instance which is $40/monthly flat. There are also other factors like region, on demand vs reservations that are ignored.

michaelt 7y ago

I suspect some of the premium is because "nobody ever got fired for buying AWS" If you chose AWS and there's a security incident or hours-long outage, well, some of the best in the industry experienced the same thing, what can you do? Whereas if you chose Linode and they had exactly the same incident justly or otherwise, people might question your choice of a cut price $10/month provider.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
Definitely the case at my company. A while ago we did an evaluation of different cloud providers and hosting solutions but it was pretty clear that “AWS” was the only acceptable answer. Which is probably ok. If you don’t have much experience in that space AWS is probably the reasonable and safe way to go.
jacurtis 7y ago
This is why a company i worked at about 3 years ago switched to AWS. I suggested using Digital Ocean and argued that we didn't need the complexity of AWS. But the CEO (who is so tech-illiterate that he struggles to send basic email, I am not even joking) has heard that everyone else uses AWS, so he wanted to use it too. Nobody was going to stop this guy from switching over to AWS. He wanted his company to rank among the cool kids that was built on AWS. He had heard of AWS and he trusts Amazon. He has never heard of Digital Ocean. His un-warranted opinion on switching to AWS was not worth fighting, so I let him switch as he desired. If any problem had ever come up with Digital Ocean, he would have pointed fingers at me and said "this wouldn't have happened with AWS, because they are AMAZON!". And thus is why one small company dumps $1,000 a month into AWS when it could dump about $250 a month into Digital Ocean for comparable results. I know these are small numbers for many people on here, but it is a good illustration. For what its worth. I was able to justify getting an AWS Certification because of this, which has been surprisingly helpful to have on my resume, even with companies that don't use AWS. It seems to be a fairly respected certification that demonstrates knowledge of cloud computing in general.
- draw_down 7y ago
  I just don't see the point of getting worked up about that money, especially if the CEO is fine with it.
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  Dude, even for a small company the difference between $1000/mo and $250/mo is peanuts.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    Maybe. But the decision heuristic here, which is "we pay 4x more for things because the CEO doesn't trust his people and like to micromanage things" can easily be fatal.
    - spookthesunset 7y ago
      The company paid $1 instead of a quarter. Why the original poster even put up a fight about saving 750 dollars.... can't tell you. They probably spent more on keeping the kitchen stocked with coffee and soda each month.

kugelblitz 7y ago

The reason I use AWS is because I can be fairly certain, that their uptime is quite high (not 100%, but it's more than I can probably guarantee if I were to run on an own server), that their eco-system is huge and they connect to each other. Being a "solo hacker" developing multiple websites, I need to prioritize where I put my time in. Thus my "default" choice is using Elastic Beanstalk to deploy websites, be it PHP, Python or something else. I can easily add environment variables, let it connect to RDS (database), scale it up (more servers or bigger servers), I can add SSL certificates, I can add a CDN (Cloudfront), I can add separate data storage (S3) all with a few clicks and from one (albeit super-huge and need-to-get-used-to) dashboard. Alternatives: I don't trust Google services for anything critical (they tend to shut down easily or they might just change their pricing drastically - e.g. in Google Maps), Azure might be an alternative, just never had the time to check it out intensively. For "fixed ceiling" projects, I use Digital Ocean (because unfortunately AWS mostly doesn't offer a budget ceiling, just alarms).

anaganisk 7y ago
Checkout Lightsail, been using it past 6 months. Power and freedom of digital ocean in AWS ecosystem.
- kugelblitz 7y ago
  Thanks! I had taken a look when it first launched, but haven't looked at it since. Will try it out for the next (low-risk) project.
- maest 7y ago
  And none of the cost control.
- pixelperfect 7y ago
  Looks like you get charged if you go over the transfer allowance. Is there a way to automatically shut everything down to prevent that from happening? I like to go months without thinking about my server, knowing there's no way for a bot army to come around and ramp up my charges. I realize that's paranoid, but Amazon's competitors give me that option.

mmahemoff 7y ago

There's really no controversy that AWS, Azure, and GCP are substantially more expensive than bare metal providers, if you're simply comparing machine specs. So if all you're doing is setting up root access and handling everything yourself, then yes, you're throwing huge wads of cash down the toilet with those platforms versus renting a VPS on Linode, Digital Ocean, etc. The economic disparity can flip, though, if you use these services as they're intended. i.e., take advantage of features that are charged incrementally and optimise to reduce how much they're activated per user transaction, where "user transaction" is a key user action such as a page serve or a reported being emailed. The costs can be much lower when you're only using what you need, and not paying for large capacity to be sitting around in case of a peak usage moment. And even more so when you consider there are automatic upgrades and ops to ensure high availability.

blissofbeing 7y ago
Easier said than done. To implement that I will probably need to hire a DevOps guy, and now we have all this cloud formation (or whatever your infra as code choice is) code to manage now. So in reality it probably costs more (devops and more code to manage) than if I just went with a couple cheaper bare metal servers. If you are running in the cloud then you still need a devops guy same as you would if you where bare metal. In fact you will probably need _more_ devops people the deeper you get into the AWS ecosystem.
- weberc2 7y ago
  What are you comparing? If you’re comparing a large, HA SaaS use case with a static website on a VPS, then of course the latter requires less DevOps work, but if you hold the use cases equivalent, AWS requires much less DevOps work than bare metal. Notably, just because you’re using bare metal doesn’t mean the motivation for infra-as-code goes away; to the contrary, you need more of it because you’re now managing more services that come out-of-the box on AWS.
  - xraystyle 7y ago
    Your static site would still probably be better on AWS. Whack it into an S3 bucket, put cloudfront in front of it, and you have a globally scalable, CDN-enabled static site with at least five 9's of reliability and it costs you peanuts.

leesalminen 7y ago

I wonder why the author is comparing AWS t3a.large to GCP n2-standard-2. It’s not an apples to apples comparison as t3a runs on AMD while n2 runs on Intel silicon.

sciurus 7y ago

The effective monthly price for that t3a.large (excluding storage) can vary from $55 to $25 depending on how much you're willing to commit in advance. See the chart at https://ibb.co/M7nnMvL https://ibb.co/M7nnMvL for some different scenarios.

ekvilibrist 7y ago

When comparing virtual machine and ephemeral block storage you're kind of missing the point of AWS "value" for me. It's the deep integration to other services. So yeah DO are perfectly fine if I just need that VPS and a few S3 buckets, but if I need managed Redis? Or something like SSM for managing secrets? Or a managed Elastic search instance?

chucky_z 7y ago
Redis themselves offer a managed service. There's https://www.envkey.com/ https://www.envkey.com/ and several alternatives. Elasticsearch offers 3 completely different tiers of support and offerings. Everyone going to AWS is going there for an AWS-like experience. As someone who runs pretty big workloads on AWS, you still very much need the help when you get to a certain scale, and there is a ton of value in just buying a support contract from Elastic or Redislabs, even when using their managed services or running it on an ec2.

NicoJuicy 7y ago

Meanwhile I have a 64GB DDR5, 512SSD and 4 TB 7200 RPM hard drive, Ryzen ( 2700 - 8 core @3,2Ghz) for 900$ as a docker host kicking cloud butt. Indeed, I don't need global-wide services though. But it's more than enough for my localized SAAS. I'll probably add some PI4's in a cluster and experiment with that ( eg. Hosting 2 message brokers instead of one) or the elastic search that requires 1,5 GB RAM ( I'm not sure yet), since I don't want that in the same server.

samsquire 7y ago
I've got a 128GB RAM 32 core Threadripper. It purrs.
ansible 7y ago
This is an apples and oranges comparison. You are using commercial-grade hardware, with no ECC RAM and other server-grade features. You are also missing RAID, the UPS power supply and generator backup, as well as redundant Internet connections to different Tier-1 providers.
- sudosysgen 7y ago
  Ryzen threadripper supports ECC memory actually. And most server grade features you could think about.
  - ansible 7y ago
    Yes, but you still have to buy it. Server-grade ECC memory is slower and more expensive than what people typically put in their desktop machines.
- NicoJuicy 7y ago
  I don't care about ECC https://blog.codinghorror.com/to-ecc-or-not-to-ecc/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/to-ecc-or-not-to-ecc/ I had hardware raid 5 before and it failed, because I used similar hard drives ( 3 drives failed within a month, wasn't expecting that). Working on redundant deployment though ;) -- My quote still stands as I said it

jrockway 7y ago

To some extent, all of these things start looking even more expensive when you realize that you're buying burstable CPU that you aren't allowed to fully utilize. At least with Amazon's t3 instance class, you are assigned "burst credits" which you accumulate by not using the CPU and consume by using the CPU. So you are paying $70 per month for "2 CPUs" but you do not get 5184000 cpu seconds / month, you get significantly less. Digital Ocean, at least, is the same for those cheap instances though I'm not sure how they dole out CPU credits (I think they yolo it and you cross your fingers that you're not sharing a physical machine with the guy doing video transcoding and CI builds). Both Amazon and Digital Ocean do have dedicated CPU instance types. The prices will make your eyes water. (I have not used the other cloud providers, so I don't know what they're up to.) Obviously selling CPU on a time-sharing basis is a good idea; most customers aren't maxing out their CPU 24/7, and this lets them pack more customers into fewer machines. (RAM is the killer, though, and you'll see that at every cloud provider, RAM is really what you pay for.) But when you compare these prices to what a CPU costs... it starts to make you think. My last job really warmed me up to the idea of just running my own servers. All our workloads were containers running in Kubernetes. With Kubernetes, I don't care about individual computers anymore. If one malfunctions, workloads can be easily moved to another computer. All the machine setup work is made machine readable by building containers and authoring Deployment objects, so there is no mental investment in a particular computer or disk image that you get from logging in, installing Debian, screwing around with files in /etc for an hour, etc. Basically, any sort of maintenance involved with physical computers no longer concerned me; repairing a hardware failure basically meant just repairing that hardware failure at my leisure and then moving on. Combined with this was the fact that we were an ISP, so we had a datacenter, power, networking, and all that the floor below our office. I eventually convinced myself that for a month worth of AWS fees, we could have 10x the computing resources and 10x the bandwidth for a one-time cost. Nobody was motivated to hand over the credit card and let me build the cluster... but for me, running dedicated servers went from "thing that only Google does" to "why isn't everyone doing this!?" It's just not that expensive. And, consumer-grade hardware is really good these days. I drooled over the fast builds we got from a c5.4xlarge AWS instance. A consumer Threadripper build would blow that out of the water for about the cost of 6 months of AWS. (Amazon pays the Intel tax. You don't have to, though.)

miniman1337 7y ago

This isnt a useful comparison, Normal S3 has 6 copies, whereas some of the others have only 3. The Durability of S3 standard is 11 9's

cbg0 7y ago
That S3 durability isn't really guaranteed by an SLA, it's just "designed" for 99.999999999% durability, but if you don't get that - too bad, I guess? To be fair, other providers also don't really offer an SLA on their durability.
- miniman1337 7y ago
  My point is that S3 is significantly more durable than the "OVH" type object storage in the posters comparison.

bszupnick 7y ago

This couldn't have come at a better time for me. I'm trying to migrate off of Heroku and my default was to AWS, but this definitely gave me more options. One advantage of AWS is that there seems to often be free AWS credits thrown around. It's hard to compare and quantify that, but something I'm aware of.

p0rkbelly 7y ago

There are lots of apples to oranges here. You can't compare say a Linode or Digital Ocean to an AWS/Azure. One of boxes for experimentation may make sense, I would not run prod though. Also, have you seen the network performance of the smaller providers? (obviously that comes at a cheaper cost too)

Roark66 7y ago

It is true that AWS is expensive considering cost of raw hardware resources. However, it is also true that it is very easy to create many kinds of apps and their support is not bad. For example using their "serverless" stuff (lambda, api gateway, static hosting in S3 and cloudfront) it is very easy to make apps with hosting cost almost perfectly matching the number of users so the only upfront capital expenditure is dev time. Another thing that is very easy on AWS is micro service apps (geographically distributed or not) consuming their managed services such as elasticache etc. Finally, automated deployments (allowing for continuous development/continuous integration if one wishes to use it) are also easy to implement quickly... The price one pays for it is vendor lock in. I wrote many mini-non-mission-critical apps to run on AWS, but I would think twice about putting my main business app in AWS without (costly)backup. I imagine that for startups it might make sense to create their initial product on AWS and when the product takes off spend some of first revenue making it cloud agnostic. The benefit of AWS is that a startup can implement a proof of concept quickly without having to worry about managing their own elastic search for example, and once it proves viable effort can be added to escape vendor-lock-in.

scarface74 7y ago
You’re always locked into your infrastructure at a certain scale. All the time you waste trying to avoid lock in, you could be using to actually deliver value to customers. Even if you are just running a bunch of EC2 instances the pain of transitioning your workload and data usually isn’t worth it.

itake 7y ago

DO is famous for randomly deleting customer data. They probably should not be included on this list.

packetlag 7y ago

This entire article is flawed. The true value add of cloud services (AWS, etc) is that you no longer have to pay for disk jockeys to run a data center. To play games with refreshing hundreds or thousands of pieces of bare metal every 3-4 years [EDIT] is to doom your company to crushing O&M. If you've never done Datacenter operations, then you're missing a giant point that eliminating an entire department of expensive technical people is a huge gain long term.

eloisant 7y ago
He is comparing big tech cloud to smaller hosting companies, like DigitalOcean and OVH, not to "run your own machines in your own data centers." He is talking about virtual machines.
shiftpgdn 7y ago
You didn't read the article at all, did you?
- packetlag 7y ago
  Read it enough to consider his primise was flawed and to judge the article as such. Running other "cloud" providers on-prem is not a recommended unless you're in Gov or Financial. [EDIT] Comparing the other cloud providers is totally a valid exercise. Just disagree with the wording of his/her approach
  - vxNsr 7y ago
    He's not suggesting doing anything on-prem.
    - packetlag 7y ago
      I stand corrected.
      - ska 7y ago

mark_l_watson 7y ago

Yes OVH and DO are much cheaper, I have used both. I retired this year, last job was engineering manager at Capital One (managed deep learning team, I had little to do with infrastructure). At large scale, AWS is a good choice because of the capable security roles that they support. Not a perfect system, but when a large corporation wants to go all in on cloud deployment, AWS is a reasonable choice. Personally, I really appreciate getting a free GCP micro instance that usually hosts two semi permanent web demos. Before I bought a good at-home GPU system, GCP was a good option for spinning up instances for machine learning runs, but Azure and AWS is also good for this. If I were trying to spin up a startup business, I probably would use DO or OVH with a hot smaller backup always running that I could switch DNS settings for rollover - but not nearly as robust as multiple availability zones with one of the expensive cloud providers.

Nican 7y ago

This is not even talked about: One of the biggest cost of cloud is also bandwidth. Usually at about $0.10/GB of outbound transfer.

gwern 7y ago
He includes a pointed link at the end to the Twitter of the AI Dungeon 2 guy - who discovered the hard way that when you have a popular app which involves downloading 6GB every time a new user shows up (or an old user, for that matter), you quickly hit $10k/day bills.
- Nican 7y ago
  Oh wow- I had not looked at that in detail. TLDR: Guy puts free game online, and is charged $0.30 for every download, raking up a $10k bill.

paulgerhardt 7y ago

The nice thing about choosing Linode is you don’t have to wait for a security incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10999397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10999397

SeanFerree 7y ago

Great article!

hodder 7y ago

"I do appreciate the youthful incredulity of thinking you can save us a million dollars a year by pointing to a hard-drive rack . It’s good to question the fundamentals! And we’ve done just that. Spreadsheets up the wazoo. We don’t spend a million dollars with glee. But you can try to cut corners on redundancy and availability, and then you can see how much leniency your customers will show you when you lose their files and have to explain yourself. I’m the one who has to say sorry! So I have to be able to look at our setup and believe we did everything possible to keep our customer’s data safe, and then some. This is that." -DHH https://m.signalvnoise.com/only-15-of-the-basecamp-operations-budget-is-spent-on-ruby/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/only-15-of-the-basecamp-operation...

mdasen 7y ago

The comparison on the Google compute instances is a bit iffy. First, why are we looking at Google's N2 instances rather than N1 instances? The N1 instance would be $52 rather than $61, but the author hasn't talked about why they selected the more expensive N2 instances. Given that competitors don't talk about the CPUs they're using, it seems weird to select the more expensive CPUs for Google. Second, Google offers dedicated hyper-threads. The author says that cloud providers (like Google) are more expensive, but they've compared dedicated hyper-threads on Google with shared hyper-threads on Digital Ocean. DO offers an 8GB 2 vCPU (2 dedicated hyper-thread) instance for $60/mo, but the author is using the 8GB instance with shared CPU for $40/mo. So, with storage, Google costs about $52 while DO costs $60 for an equivalent instance. Linode's $60 8GB dedicated vCPU instance does come with 4 cores so it seems like a better value. One can also argue that the included transfer on Digital Ocean offers $8 in value. However, the premium for the instances alone isn't as big for Google. In fact, google seems cheaper. Now, it's probably a fair comparison for Amazon's instance which only gives you CPU credits for around a third of the time. Google's automatic sustained-use discounts and dedicated hyper-threads make it really competitive with Digital Ocean (if you don't need a lot of bandwidth) as long as you're doing an apples-to-apples comparison. DO's over-sold CPU instances will be cheaper because you're getting less. If DO didn't offer dedicated hyper-thread instances, maybe you could claim that they were equivalent. But DO literally sells something more equivalent for $60 rather than $40. EDIT: Also, OVH is a bad comparison. OVH is cheap, but inconsistent in their product offerings. The author notes that they offer hosted DB services, but that's only in France. Their US, Canada, Singapore, Germany, Poland, and Australia locations don't offer that. Their US website is missing pricing on many of the things they seem to offer. Plus, at a certain point, when you're trusting someone with your datastore, you want a high level of certainty. OVH's website doesn't inspire confidence given how much seems like someone didn't even check it. It's certainly cheap, but it seems cheap for a reason. One final thought: I'm surprised the author hasn't talked about transfer pricing. Cloud providers usually charge a bundle while others charge a lot less. 1 cent per GB at Digital Ocean is a lot less than the 9 cents per GB at AWS. AWS even charges 1 cent per GB for data transfer between AZs in the same region. If you're running a compute and Kafka cluster in 2 AZs, then writing 1GB to a quorum of 3 servers means paying 1.5 cents per GB written (assuming that half the time you're writing to 2 servers outside your AZ and half the time you're writing to one server outside your AZ). Likewise, when you go to read it, if half the time you're not reading from a local AZ, you're paying half-a-cent per GB to read the data. So processing 1GB costs 2 cents. That adds up fast. Everyone compares things like compute instances and seems to ignore data transfer costs. Frankly, Google is competitive on storage and compute costs with places like DO. However, if you are trying to create the next Imgur, you probably care more about transfer costs than compute or storage costs.

thayne 7y ago

It seems like this is assuming something like a simple webserver without HA requirements, but doesn't explicitly state that assumption. There is no mention of reliability or SLAs.

jahrichie 7y ago

I'm no AWS fanboy, and sure its not the cheapest out there, but this is assuming that all cloud providers provide the same level of services for their machines, which is a complete joke. There are OS, Software, security, ease of tools, even speed of scale considerations that have more to do with why 90% of the internet is on AWS lol. There's a reason the only approved government cloud for years has been AWS. Also, heads up, AWS also offers far more services than ALL of those other providers you mentioned. So when you actually start running a real ONLINE business, and need ETL, MUTLI-AZ, WHAREHOUSEING, AUTOSCALE, S3, ETC, all those things talk to each other out of the box and your vendor list doesn't go from 1 to 50.

hurricanetc 7y ago
I think the point is that many AWS customers aren’t doing all of that and still assume they are saving money. I would finger in the wind guess that a majority of AWS customers are just renting servers and storage and not even scratching the surface of the usefulness of the platform. Just my guess.
- asdfman123 7y ago
  Sure they aren't, but they don't want it to be a big hassle when it turns out a few years later, they actually need those features. My employer is okay with paying an extra $10k/mo for stability and predictability.
- scarface74 7y ago
  We don’t assume we are saving money. We are a smallish B2B company. We are far more concerned with being able to scale up when a new client can increase our load (and revenue) noticeably. The money we save by not having someone babysitting infrastructure and the speed we can move at is well worth it. One client contract basically pays our entire infrastructure bill and then some and we have 30 clients. If we had to hire one Devops person it would be about the same as our yearly bill if not slightly more.
birdyrooster 7y ago
Why bother locking in when Kubernetes operators and resources can deploy and maintain the lifecycle of common services? Why would I want some old, forked version of elasticsearch (for example) when I can have the latest version automatically provisioned and scaled with high availability? What is the AWS value add as Kubernetes operators become mature? They own datacenter space and have contracts for power and internet.

zywx 7y ago

This is not an ultra fair comparaison since Amazon has huge discount when you signed up for a year for example. Not to mention spot instances... But yes OVH has a lot to offer and got my preference too. But I am French and it is a French success!

bgroins 7y ago
Yeah this is an extremely limited use case with very few data points. It doesn't take into account corporate discounts, spot instances, reserved instances, savings gained from replatforming/rearchitecting to *aaS options. The author here must have very limited enterprise cloud experience.
- tomerico 7y ago
  Part of this point is that Amazon / Google / Microsoft pricing is intentionally complex, which at the end of the day leads to surprise / higher costs

diyseguy 7y ago

What I wish is that someone would make a blog post that shows you just how much you can realistically do while staying under the "free" tier limits and what innocent "mistakes" will take you over the line into regrettably expensive monthly bill

diyseguy 7y ago
Also, I wonder why Amazon hasn't gotten into the ad platform business? They've gotten into everyone else's business. Isn't that the dream - to host a website on their platform and have it be self-supported via ads and possibly even profitable?

quirkot 7y ago

No one ever got fired for choosing IBM... i mean AWS

asdfman123 7y ago
It might be CYA in action. However, risk has real cost. Risk of needing more than the little guys provide, risk of them disappearing or the service not keeping up with the times. For some people, the risk way outweighs the extra hosting cost.

code4tee 7y ago

The premium, and highly profitable, market leader is more expensive than other offerings that are trying to play catch-up on market share. This is not exactly a groundbreaking or unknown finding. BMWs also cost more then Fiat’s Also, AWS has become the new IBM and as they used to say “nobody gets fired for choosing IBM.” In the current market if you choose something other than AWS people will question your decision if something goes wrong.

sudosysgen 7y ago
OVH is older than AWS and profitable as it is.

kube-system 7y ago

Ignoring that this really isn't an accurate comparison of TCO or performance, this really isn't surprising to anyone who has experience working with enterprise sales. Specs alone will rarely win a sale. Intangibles still have a lot of worth in the b2b space.

hitekker 7y ago

The top comment here rebutts this article from a business perspective: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21313816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21313816

mharroun 7y ago

As someone who's worked at many startups and look at this from that point of view. Here are my key points: - What makes aws great is NOT ec2... it's the ALB, route53, ecs/eks/fargate, redshift, rds, lambda, SQS, Kinesis, cloudwatch, cloudfront... ect. The last startup I was at our production MySql got corrupted... glad I paid for RDS and had their 5 minute interval backups to s3 that required 1 click. - Nearly everyone is on aws, if aws is down the internet is down. The down time from aws is often hand waved away. - With aws I have access to 3rd party services like snowflake and databricks. Hiring and training talent is more expensive then ease of use services. - The cost to performance ratio had always been worth it for every startup* I worked at (double given aws gives baiscly a free year when you raise a round of vc funding). Its costly to dedicate staff/time to infrastructure. I had a real time data pipeline up in under 2 hrs using kensis and imply. Just having to set up somthing like kafka alone will take a multiplitude longer. *The exception being the startup that did billions of requests a day... I doubt they regretting paying aws to get to that point after 6ish years.

kortilla 7y ago
> Nearly everyone is on aws, if aws is down the internet is down. The down time from aws is often hand waved away. This is not even close to true. The 3rd answer has some numbers for you: https://www.quora.com/How-essential-is-AWS-to-the-internet https://www.quora.com/How-essential-is-AWS-to-the-internet You’ll notice that the most dramatic responses come from other AWS devs like yourself (the first answer in the quora link). This is because as an AWS devotee you end up in an echo chamber.
- mharroun 7y ago
  In my experience its true. When S3 went down my companies systems started malfunctioning, as well as many other vendors/system all over the internet including things like slack. Our customers were experiencing pain from multiple vendor failures. When our customers cant order lunch, run trello, or sent chat messages on slack they blame "the internet". Note:I take offence to being called an AWS devotee, I have been in this space professionally for going on 13 years with nearly all of it in the startup space. The early years had to rely on collocation. To see startups struggle from things like hardware failure and delaying sales because they need more hardware is something I do not fondly remember.

all_blue_chucks 7y ago

News flash: elastic pricing is not optimal for static workloads.

continuational 7y ago

Hetzner, less than €10: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=ot https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=ot

scarejunba 7y ago

Ad pixel servers. Literally go from 1x to 4x at peak. If we had to pay for 4x all the time, it wouldn't be feasible. And then add in that feeding through the managed technologies allows you to build lots of product with small teams means it's a no brainer.

kohanz 7y ago

While I appreciate the analysis, the perspective this whole blog post takes misses the mark on how AWS provides value. You can't look at it simply as providing commodity computation and storage. As a solo SAAS founder, I use AWS because of all the other services that surround those offerings (Cognito for user management, DynamoDB for database, Serverless stack for API, SES, SQS, Route53, ECS, I could go on for a while) provide a huge amount of value for me in terms of not having to fully set up and maintain that functionality myself. I pay next to nothing for these services and the developer and devops hours saved is worth many thousands of $ to me. However, because of this reliance, I then end up knowingly overpaying for storage, computation, and bandwidth (the latter is by far the biggest concern, the former 2 are fairly minor, so I'm looking at alternative CDN providers). However, other than that, even though my AWS bill is the biggest my SAAS has, I happily pay it. There would be almost no way for me to run this thing solo without it (I'm not saying someone else couldn't, just for me).

jweather 7y ago

My favorite use case for AWS is being able to spin up temporary resources for rendering, video transcoding, or lab testing, and then shut them back down after a few hours. Likewise I can see a huge win for cyclical traffic loads in only paying for what you use, and in being able to scale up on a dime. Comparing it to a monthly $x/mo provider isn't a fair comparison.

sudosysgen 7y ago
What you're doing is probably much more expensive in the long run than buying a GPU or using a dedicated rendering service.

g9yuayon 7y ago

Sometimes it's all about priority. I can't speak for the author and I don't know what the author needs, but my experience tells me, again and again, using cloud services is all about productivity, and people tend to underestimate the cost of lost productivity and missing opportunities. I'll give two examples. Netflix focused on productivity. They even popularized the phrase "undifferentiated heavy lifting". They were able to build a metric system, in less than a year, that supported full OLAP query with practically arbitrary number of dimensions. The system ingested > 20 billion data points per minute, ran on more than a thousand machines, and did not set quota to any team or service. The entire system was built and operated by merely three engineers. This was simply not possible without AWS. Similarly, Netflix's data pipeline, Elasticsearch cluster, and Druid clusters were developed and operated by two engineers. They were oncall 24x7, yet they rarely got waken up in the middle of a night. You think this was possible if Netflix tried to build its own infrastructure? The counter example is Uber. Uber was ambitious and wanted to build everything. The results? More than 200 alerts got fired within 2 hours -- the poor oncall engineer couldn't do anything but to keep ack'ing the alerts. Wanted to use Cassandra? 10-page forms that were more tedious than applying for the Ivy schools, weeks of waits, lots of angry emails, countless meetings, and still no Cassandra instances. Wanted to add 50 machines to your ES cluster? PPTs, meetings, escalation all the way to CTO, and weeks of planning. Want to try out Apache Kudu? No way, because our container-based EC2-like system did not support persistent volume, let alone something similar to EBS or EFS. Wanted to use container for your ES cluster? Same answer. Wanted to create your bespoke cluster topology? Same answer because apparently custom network configuration was not supported. After waiting for more than three years? Same answer. If this was not expensive, I don't know what was. So, you asked if you should save a few thousand bucks a month for your fast-growing company?

blantonl 7y ago

I often see these comparisons done to try to discredit the use of cloud computing resources, often comparing single cloud entities to bare metal one-for-one comparisons. But that's now how compute is delivered in projects any more. The value isn't on the box, it's on the platform. I'm personally about to bolt together a solution that will need to scale significantly, that uses complex message queuing, enormous amounts of object storage, expose set of APIs, and require a highly available distributed document store. And I'm going to personally do it by myself without having to hire 14 SMEs across each of the domains. The value isn't in a cheaper linux server, or less expensive bandwidth. The value is me being able to develop a solution from the ground up by bolting together Web services, Amazon S3, SNS/SQS, Lambda and DynamoDB from a menu of integrated services all by myself. Period.

kortilla 7y ago
> The value isn't in a cheaper linux server, or less expensive bandwidth. The value is me being able to develop a solution from the ground up by bolting together Web services, Amazon S3, SNS/SQS, Lambda and DynamoDB from a menu of integrated services all by myself. Period. Cool. It sounds like money doesn’t matter to you because you’ve identified a really high margin business and time to market is critical. This doesn’t match how 99% of businesses work though.
- bduerst 7y ago
  Precisely. APIs and ubiquitous services across providers has made multi-cloud possible.
  - spookthesunset 7y ago
    Multi-cloud is a stupid idea. You absolutely should get locked into a single cloud vendor and leverage the shit out of everything they offer. Somebody else said it best. People go to the cloud not to escape the hardware, it is to escape all the people who administrate the hardware. Truer words have never been spoken. Escaping all the gatekeepers of traditional setups adds significant value to a company.

echelon 7y ago

Are there any reasons for going bare metal today? Does it lead to competitive advantage in some scenarios? Imagine if Netflix or Twitch were founded today - two businesses with demanding media-hosting needs. Would they be better if they used Amazon infra or built out their own data centers and CDNs? I'm really curious about this because I'd like to get into the space and I'm mulling over bare metal as a competitive advantage vs a barrier to scaling. I've seen how difficult it is to provision and upgrade machines. At the same time, if you were to make it to scale, it seems like having the bare metal and the talent to manage it puts the ball back in your court. Am I wrong?

bobobooey 7y ago
Seems like something you wouldn't want to maintain, especially on day 1. It's always something that can be built and transfer over to after the business has grown and developed.
takeda 7y ago
You mentioned Netflix, they did started with their own data centers eventually they moved their website to AWS, but all the heavy lifting is still happening through their caching servers that they send to ISPs[1]. [1] https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
drkrab 7y ago
Netflix only uses amazon for the “control plane” - ie the “web app” you’re navigating when using the Netflix app. The actual delivery of media happens via their own CDN (of bare-metal servers.)

fooster 7y ago

I've run substantial systems (200+ node operations) on OVH and it was completely unreliable. The hardware kept breaking down, the internal network was terrible, and the support was terrible. Sometimes some backhoe would cut the network connection and cause a 12 hour outage (ok, over 3 years only twice). It was also was inelastic, and provisioning was slow. So if I needed new hardware there could be considerable lead time required. We also tried Heztner, Linode and others. They were all bad in their own unique ways. With AWS, and GCP, yes it is more expensive and also have their own set of problems but nowhere near the same scale as these other providers. Yes if you are running a 1-2 machine setup, who cares. If you are running a professional organisation where you cannot reasonably have downtime without customers screaming, don't go for the cheap stuff.

privateSFacct 7y ago
This - some of remember the MULTIPLE CONTROL PLANE takeovers at these third rate places. Seriously - root access on the control plane - that was then covered up. You really are going to build your business there? There is a reason AWS can charge the premium. I quickly learned my lession in linode at least!
freedomben 7y ago
I haven't used OVH a whole lot, but it's my go-to for small stuff because it's such a good value for the price. I have spun up a lot of instances on AWS and OVH now, and haven't noticed a speed difference. In fact OVH seem faster. Are you talking about VM instances or something else that takes a while to provision?

angry_octet 7y ago

In some ways you just can't compare, i.e., Cloud Formation and software defined infrastructure is a completely new way of architecting services, but if you're doing more than serving web pages, anything data heavy, the storage and egress costs are incredibly high. Consider the costs of a rack of Supermicro thumpers (90 bays https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/chassis/4U/946/SC946ED-R2KJBOD https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/chassis/4U/946/SC946E...) for long term large online storage vs AWS. Even using Glacier (which is cached tape) is expensive in comparison, especially when read/egress costs are included. Even if you use more enterprisey gear from Dell it is MUCH cheaper to DIY or pay an independent integrator than to use AWS. AWS itself it doing this for even cheaper than what white box gear sells to retail, because of their huge scale and integration efficiencies. There is a reason AWS makes so much money.

NewEntryHN 7y ago

There is no mention of uptime or SLA.

werber 7y ago

I’m a front end developer For work and more and more aws experience is explicitly asked for, I feel like I have no choice but to use their services for personal projects just so I can honestly say I have that experience.

raviolo 7y ago

Ironically, the per-terabyte price to buy HDD storage these days is roughly equal to what Amazon charges for object storage per month. Source: Amazon store ;)

Eikon 7y ago
This is not ironic as it's absolutely not relevant. The HDD that you buy is not redundant, don't provide more than a very limited throughput, is not distributed across multiple geographic areas, is not connected to the internet, comes without any of the hardware to make it spin and is not benefiting from s3 APIs as far as I know. You are comparing the costs of buying gas vs the costs actually associated with driving.

WatchDog 7y ago

Given that AWS operates at an unprecedented scale yet still seems to charge a premium over smaller operators, can someone explain why their operating margin[0] of ~25% seems relatively small in comparison to what one might expect? Is this simply because they reinvest a lot of their revenue into product development, or are they much less efficient than they might be able to be? [0] https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazoncom-announces-third-quarter-sales-24-700-billion https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...

adventured 7y ago
> their operating margin[0] of ~25% seems relatively small in comparison to what one might expect? Your setup premise is too constrained, you only provide two possible answers. One, they reinvest a lot; two, they're much less efficient than someone (who?) expects. The third one is that you're wrong about how much margin is in the business to begin with. The smaller operators are barely surviving at break-even or worse. Companies like Linode and DigitalOcean are not printing large profit margins. DigitalOcean has been a money losing operation (growing via hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital and debt, plausibly self-sustaining some day when they decide to pull back on spending expansion vs growth... maybe). So the premium that Amazon is charging is precisely what is responsible for them comparatively printing money with a ~25% operating margin. It's not the other way around, such that their margin should be up at 50% if they were run properly as a business. It's something close to remarkable that they have a 25% operating profit margin (and are consistently so profitable), it's the envy of the entire cloud industry.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Also why they can safely drop prices if someone else eats their lunch.

aeturnum 7y ago

I think this is a nice little piece (though as others have said - not exactly breaking new ground) and I just wanted to add something to this: > "Smaller providers cannot operate at my yottabyte scale" I used to work at a company, now closed, that at one point was the #2 or #3 user of S3 in the world. We were not a big company and the fact that we were inexorably bound to Amazon was a harbinger of our doom. That we were too large for most solutions and that we had become trapped on one provider was a sign of our poor decisions and our inability to think laterally and, effectively, do anything other than digging straight down. I raise this because I think that, if you ever find yourself thinking you're too big for a small provider, I think you should treat that fact as an existential threat to your company. Either you build your own hardware setup or you break up how you do things so you can use smaller companies (even if you chose not to). All the tooling and learning you do to fragment, migrate and validate your data will be invaluable.

spookthesunset 7y ago
Or you just use a cloud provider, which will be able to scale well beyond whatever your company grows to. > All the tooling and learning you do to fragment, migrate and validate your data will be invaluable. Too bad this learning has absolutely nothing to do with 99% of any business out there. It adds zero value to the company. In fact, it is a net negative because the company could be doing anything but learning something like that. Opportunity cost is a real cost.

Aeolun 7y ago

When people choose AWS, they do not need only virtual machines. They need the whole range of products that AWS has to offer, and that range is huge.

petethepig 7y ago

Your average AWS and Digital Ocean customers have very different needs. Hence different feature sets and different pricing. Running a simple Wordpress blog on AWS is just as stupid as running a 1000 instance cluster on Digital Ocean. Also, why don't you compare Digital Ocean to Amazon Lightsail? Or spot instances? You can often get those for 1/10 of on-demand price.

robbya 7y ago

This should include some data transfer and associated costs. Some of the services the services listed include a certain amount of bandwidth in the listed price, while others don't.

miguelmota 7y ago

In the long run you could save 50% or more if using reserved instances on AWS.

whatsmyusername 7y ago

I immediately disregarded the authors opinion when they put OVH in the same league as major cloud providers. OVH is a source of nothing but spam/malware/outright malicious traffic from our perspective. We have a job that automatically updates an AWS WAF IP blacklist with their ASN ranges from BGP. We don't want their business or their customers business.

gamedna 7y ago

This is a good start. What would have made this article compelling is a performance vs price comparison. cpu, iops, network, etc. extra credit for sampling a statistically significant number of vms across multiple regions and availability zones per provider.

sbr464 7y ago

I think this argument/comparison warrants including the pricing of purchasing a hands on rack from a data center directly. A full 1Gbps up/down cost about $200/mo, plus ~$150/mo for the managed fiber run. A full locked rack is around 800-1,200$/month. You can load up 40U worth of Dell R730xd, or R740xd (dell outlet). Throw in a few enterprise HP 10g fiber switches (refurbished). You will quickly start to crush any cloud pricing. But you need IT/VMWare experience. Keep in mind that a cpu/core on AWS or GCP is a fraction of an actual cpu/core. It’s a spot representation of an x cpu from some arbitrary time way back when. Even if their specs say differently, try running a job on a 2x cpu machine vs 2x cpu on dedicated hardware.

nhumrich 7y ago
Cloud computing is cheaper, not because its actually cheaper, but because of elasticity. If you dont need elasticity, then yes, colo will always be cheaper. If you are in the cloud you should be autoscaling, as that is the main premise of why the cloud took over, and why the cloud can save you money. Only pay for what you need right now That being said, if you can actually plan well enough in the future for colo, you can also pay 3 years in advanced for aws reserved, and pay significantly less than these prices.
- sbr464 7y ago
  I completely agree. I only mentioned because the article included providers that don’t include the same level of ecosystem benefits, which seems slightly unfair (from a CTO/board decision perspective). I think including a baseline colo option gives insight. Also, purchasing Dell R7xx hardware, from our experience, has almost 100% uptime at scale, over the past 10+ years, confidently running a 3yr machine 5-7 yrs easily.

jakobmi 7y ago

One more idea: "$BIG_TECH will still exist in 10 or 20 years."

jakobmi 7y ago

According to the results, shouldn't the title be "The Microsoft Premium"?

jakobmi 7y ago

One more idea: "$BIG_TECH has huge developer economies-of-scale". Whenever I or one of our devs has a problem with AWS or configuration, there's a 99% probability that anyone had this problem before and I find high quality google search results. That's not the case for OVH, Digital Ocean, ... With developer salaries at 350'000 USD/year, you can now calculate the massive amount of savings.

danial 7y ago

Good luck trying to get a host with 192GB RAM on OVH. It takes days for the host to be provisioned and you have to fill out forms and provide identification. On AWS if I want to run a model that requires a lot of RAM (or compute, or whatever) I can have it up and running in minutes without thinking too much about it. Yes, I pay a premium, but the experience is just superior to anything the value hosting services provide. I find the same to be true for the most part in Azure as well. I'm happy seeing this comparison, however. It gives me a good sense of just how much of a premium I'm paying. Thanks for doing this.

kexx 7y ago

You buy a shoe: $50, you buy a shoe exactly the same quality, but it's a nike: $120. Cloud is exactly the same kind of product than anything else

Hnrobert42 7y ago

Sentence 1: Amazon is probably the largest cloud services company in the world. Probably? Back button where art thou.