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Paying an infrastructure provider and a managed k8s / other "cloud" API vendor separately is actually very reasonable. There is no good reason those two things
by closeparen 7y ago
Paying an infrastructure provider and a managed k8s / other "cloud" API vendor separately is actually very reasonable. There is no good reason those two things should be tightly coupled. Amazon should not get to charge a markup on hardware because of the software that runs on it. That's a regression not only from open source, but from shrink-wrapped proprietary software too. Putting the cloud back in shrink-wrap world could add a lot of value: buy commodity capacity, still write "cloud" applications for it, split the hardware savings with IBM.
To compete, Amazon will have to either lower its markup or innovate in proprietary hardware (as it's starting to do with Graviton2) to provide value-added services that software on commodity hardware can't effectively replicate. And IBM basically invented that game, so good luck.
Not to say IBM is capable of executing it, but it’s an interesting strategy.
- wmf 7y agoSpeaking of k8s markup, AWS only charges for the masters and they recently cut those prices by 50%. This problem doesn't exist.
- ablekh 7y agoWhy do you think AWS charges for K8s master nodes (control plane), when both of their major competitors do not?
- wmf 7y agoBecause they can, of course. But it's still hard to imagine a third-party product (e.g. OpenShift) being cheaper than $0.10 per hour.
- ablekh 7y agoThey surely can. But so is true for Azure and GCP as well. Thus, I'm curious about whether it is a feasible pricing strategy for AWS, considering the fact that EKS is not much different from their competition's managed K8s offerings.
- wmf 7y agoI mean AWS can charge more because they're viewed as the "default" or "leader" cloud; Google and Azure are not.
- ablekh 7y agoUnderstood. This IMO is a bit of a shaky ground, because, while still being (or being perceived as) a cloud leader - though Azure a formidable competitor across the cloud spectrum - AWS is definitely not a leader in the managed K8s area (where GCP clearly is, at least, as of now).
- closeparen 7y agoEC2 costs almost twice as much per core as my company’s in house datacenters, and that’s before bandwidth.
- adrianN 7y agoBut can you just turn your datacenter off and not pay for it when you don't use it? Can you double the number of cores in your datacenter by running a script and waiting five minutes? There is little point in using EC2 if you never want to do either, I agree. But it seems like many people do and are willing to pay more per core to do so.
- closeparen 7y agoThe idea of a hybrid cloud solution is to pay EC2 rates for only the unpredictable portion of your workload. It is in fact a little cheaper to keep 2x spare capacity on hand vs. run the 1x workload on AWS all the time.