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> 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 c

by sly010 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. The post is not about cloud computing vs bare metal, it is about AWS compute and storage being more expensive. All the alternatives presented are cloud providers. The article provides data, you are providing hyperbole. You are not even wrong. AWS probably IS the most feature complete PAAS, but you can't deny it's also the most expensive IAAS.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
I still think this misses the point. Looking at individual services (especially the most comparable "commoditized" services like EC2 and S3) is not how most people derive value from cloud services these days. In fact, as someone who just made a cloud decision for a company, pricing of individual services almost wasn't even on my radar. At the end of the day these differences are almost inconsequential to me compared to bigger issues like "is this service missing critical features". For example, I really like Google's cloud, but I'm a bit baffled their postgres Cloud SQL offering still doesn't offer point-in-time-recovery, which is a critical need for me, while AWS has had it for a long time. So do you really think I'm worried that S3 buckets may be slightly more expensive, compared to how much more it would cost me in developer time if I had to manage my own postgres instances on a compute machine? I do think the data in this article was valuable, and it probably is likely that AWS charges more for these services because they can - the total value people get from the whole AWS system makes it worth it. So if you only care about a compute instance and storage, you probably don't need AWS, but the second the decision becomes "Do I have to hire a developer if I have to do this thing on my own?" it becomes pretty clear why people want a more full-featured cloud.

by sly010 7y ago

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

I still think this misses the point. Looking at individual services (especially the most comparable "commoditized" services like EC2 and S3) is not how most people derive value from cloud services these days. In fact, as someone who just made a cloud decision for a company, pricing of individual services almost wasn't even on my radar. At the end of the day these differences are almost inconsequential to me compared to bigger issues like "is this service missing critical features". For example, I really like Google's cloud, but I'm a bit baffled their postgres Cloud SQL offering still doesn't offer point-in-time-recovery, which is a critical need for me, while AWS has had it for a long time. So do you really think I'm worried that S3 buckets may be slightly more expensive, compared to how much more it would cost me in developer time if I had to manage my own postgres instances on a compute machine? I do think the data in this article was valuable, and it probably is likely that AWS charges more for these services because they can - the total value people get from the whole AWS system makes it worth it. So if you only care about a compute instance and storage, you probably don't need AWS, but the second the decision becomes "Do I have to hire a developer if I have to do this thing on my own?" it becomes pretty clear why people want a more full-featured cloud.