9 ms·

We at Amazon want you to test on Amazon's servers! After all, Jeff Bezos owns every server on the planet. Pay it no mind that developing software and testing i

by kick 7y ago

We at Amazon want you to test on Amazon's servers! After all, Jeff Bezos owns every server on the planet. Pay it no mind that developing software and testing it on AWS is an order of magnitude more expensive than doing things on-premises: don't worry, you're not being ripped off any more than usual! All of those big "unicorn" tech companies you look up to are doing it—everyone from BP to GE to the people who rip you off on concert tickets to the guys that made Fortnite—it's all the rage, nowadays! That $20,000,000 in venture capital you got could surely be used to set up a dev environment for almost two whole months! Call now and we'll even throw in three whole extra days (throttled by 50%)!﹡ ﹡Restrictions may apply. Not valid in the state of California or to companies registered in Delaware. We reserve the right to change the terms of the agreement without prior notice.

throwaway894345 7y ago
> that developing software and testing it on AWS is an order of magnitude more expensive than doing things on-premises Is there any truth to this? Every time I see this claim, it is actually comparing the price tag for servers in the on-prem case with the price tag for compute on AWS/etc (which includes a whole lot of engineering and data center management costs). It's a pretty meaningless comparison. My guess is that AWS has the economies of scale to outperform your average private data center on a total-cost-of-ownership basis.
- tedunangst 7y ago
  How much data center does one really need for a build server?
  - different_sort 7y ago
    A lot if your expectation is to have it "just working" all the time.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      Although that can be a consideration, we started this thread talking about dev/test environments, where you just don't need that many 9s.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- TheFiend7 7y ago
  One year of a a1.2xlarge 8vcpu 16gb RAM costs $1782.144 excluding storage. I could build a pretty decent server with that money that would last easily half a decade if not longer. I could double the cores and mem probably too.
  - walrus01 7y ago
    If all you want is a development machine and electricity is not particularly expensive, you can buy a used 32-core, quad socket Xeon with 128GB of RAM for half that. Dell r910 or similar. It's about a 500W load. Or you could get an eight core / 32GB ram machine for under $230 on eBay.
  - ksec 7y ago
    Let's be fair, you are actually paying extra for elastic capacity. I.e You expect to have a 2nd Server Ready when ever you need. Not to mention the Cloud is suppose to add a little redundancy, so in case your server fail you could switch on another in an instant. So in reality I will always times the cost of server ( over X months period ) + colocation / month by 2.5. And Double that to give them Margin for support etc. That is roughly 5x the cost. And in most cases seems to be what AWS is charging for. Not saying I agree with their pricing.
  - jandrewrogers 7y ago
    AWS uses the industry standard financial model for leased infrastructure with EC2 instances: all offered pricing structures recover hardware costs at 6 months. After 6 months, your cost basis is OpEx only. The margins on month 7 and beyond are very good. If you operate at sufficient scales to amortize the fixed overhead of operations (which is not that large of a scale), you can break even running your own server infrastructure within 12 months versus AWS if you know what you are doing. That last part is a big caveat, but not a large hurdle. There are other considerations but in pure hardware terms, on AWS you've bought the hardware after 6 months of utilization.
  - tbrock 7y ago
    How does the yearly cost change if it becomes an upfront paid reserved instance over 5 years? My guess is the advantage evaporates.
- cubano 7y ago
  I recently provisioned a "micro-" instance...the smallest possible server available, as I fell hook, line, and sinker for the "FREE 12 months!" promotion that turned out to be totally false. For 3 months, I was charged $11,$23, and finally $4 for 3 days of the 3rd months, where I QUICKLY cancelled the server...this is OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive for a single processor, 1G RAM, 30GB SSD cloud server! $37 for some 64 days is totally overpriced. You can get high quality low cost cloud servers for less then $5/month, and if you purchase a full year, half that. Amazon really disappointed me with their FREE bait-n-switch bullshit marketing, and I will NEVER recommend their low end servers again.
  - cthalupa 7y ago
    Having definitely gotten out for $0 on the free tier, it sounds like you somehow ended up with other services or on an instance type that was not free tier eligible.
    - cookiecaper 7y ago
      Which isn't an accident, to be fair. AWS pricing is deceptive on purpose, with many cross-dependencies that each have their own price points, exclusions, and caveats. Only this many cents to use this thing, which, heh, I guess it requires this thing too, and this thing, and this thing ... man, some of these cents are adding up. Oh, a "NAT Gateway" is $30/mo? Well, OK. Keep going for a few weeks and you're staring down a bill for a rather scary number of cents while the CFO's angry rants can be heard half-way across the office. There are entire consultancies that specialize in decoding AWS bills. Let's not pull leg here.
      - amylene 7y ago
        Do you have any evidence that their pricing is confusing on purpose?
rkagerer 7y ago
Imagine a SaaS platform that came with tooling to let you locally emulate the characteristics of different options on their infrastructure. We don't necessarily care about matching absolute production performance, but could throttle things to get the right ratio between performance of CPU, memory bandwidth, disk IO, etc, in order to explore which code tweaks will have the biggest relative impact on your workload. It would let you do a bunch of your testing and optimization locally, for free. Could be an edge to distinguish you from the competition, although I'm not sure it's a big enough one to warrant a business case. Maybe it would be attractive to shops whose development costs are high compared to production (i.e. startups and enterprises with lots of ongoing customization), but probably not so much for the established, internet-based businesses where I'm guessing the big money is (like Netflix).
- andrewxdiamond 7y ago
  Maybe not to the extent you want, but Azure Stack lets you run many types of cloud infrastructure on site, including production workloads, for a small fee. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/azure-stack/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/azure-stack/
colecut 7y ago
Whats wrong with the guys that made Fortnite? I think their business model is genius. Make a free game, capable of cross-platform multiplayer across nearly all devices, and let people waste their money on skins and dances that give no competitive edge if they want to.

by kick 7y ago

throwaway894345 7y ago

> that developing software and testing it on AWS is an order of magnitude more expensive than doing things on-premises Is there any truth to this? Every time I see this claim, it is actually comparing the price tag for servers in the on-prem case with the price tag for compute on AWS/etc (which includes a whole lot of engineering and data center management costs). It's a pretty meaningless comparison. My guess is that AWS has the economies of scale to outperform your average private data center on a total-cost-of-ownership basis.

tedunangst 7y ago
How much data center does one really need for a build server?
- different_sort 7y ago
  A lot if your expectation is to have it "just working" all the time.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    Although that can be a consideration, we started this thread talking about dev/test environments, where you just don't need that many 9s.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
TheFiend7 7y ago
One year of a a1.2xlarge 8vcpu 16gb RAM costs $1782.144 excluding storage. I could build a pretty decent server with that money that would last easily half a decade if not longer. I could double the cores and mem probably too.
- walrus01 7y ago
  If all you want is a development machine and electricity is not particularly expensive, you can buy a used 32-core, quad socket Xeon with 128GB of RAM for half that. Dell r910 or similar. It's about a 500W load. Or you could get an eight core / 32GB ram machine for under $230 on eBay.
- ksec 7y ago
  Let's be fair, you are actually paying extra for elastic capacity. I.e You expect to have a 2nd Server Ready when ever you need. Not to mention the Cloud is suppose to add a little redundancy, so in case your server fail you could switch on another in an instant. So in reality I will always times the cost of server ( over X months period ) + colocation / month by 2.5. And Double that to give them Margin for support etc. That is roughly 5x the cost. And in most cases seems to be what AWS is charging for. Not saying I agree with their pricing.
- jandrewrogers 7y ago
  AWS uses the industry standard financial model for leased infrastructure with EC2 instances: all offered pricing structures recover hardware costs at 6 months. After 6 months, your cost basis is OpEx only. The margins on month 7 and beyond are very good. If you operate at sufficient scales to amortize the fixed overhead of operations (which is not that large of a scale), you can break even running your own server infrastructure within 12 months versus AWS if you know what you are doing. That last part is a big caveat, but not a large hurdle. There are other considerations but in pure hardware terms, on AWS you've bought the hardware after 6 months of utilization.
- tbrock 7y ago
  How does the yearly cost change if it becomes an upfront paid reserved instance over 5 years? My guess is the advantage evaporates.
cubano 7y ago
I recently provisioned a "micro-" instance...the smallest possible server available, as I fell hook, line, and sinker for the "FREE 12 months!" promotion that turned out to be totally false. For 3 months, I was charged $11,$23, and finally $4 for 3 days of the 3rd months, where I QUICKLY cancelled the server...this is OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive for a single processor, 1G RAM, 30GB SSD cloud server! $37 for some 64 days is totally overpriced. You can get high quality low cost cloud servers for less then $5/month, and if you purchase a full year, half that. Amazon really disappointed me with their FREE bait-n-switch bullshit marketing, and I will NEVER recommend their low end servers again.
- cthalupa 7y ago
  Having definitely gotten out for $0 on the free tier, it sounds like you somehow ended up with other services or on an instance type that was not free tier eligible.
  - cookiecaper 7y ago
    Which isn't an accident, to be fair. AWS pricing is deceptive on purpose, with many cross-dependencies that each have their own price points, exclusions, and caveats. Only this many cents to use this thing, which, heh, I guess it requires this thing too, and this thing, and this thing ... man, some of these cents are adding up. Oh, a "NAT Gateway" is $30/mo? Well, OK. Keep going for a few weeks and you're staring down a bill for a rather scary number of cents while the CFO's angry rants can be heard half-way across the office. There are entire consultancies that specialize in decoding AWS bills. Let's not pull leg here.
    - amylene 7y ago
      Do you have any evidence that their pricing is confusing on purpose?

rkagerer 7y ago

Imagine a SaaS platform that came with tooling to let you locally emulate the characteristics of different options on their infrastructure. We don't necessarily care about matching absolute production performance, but could throttle things to get the right ratio between performance of CPU, memory bandwidth, disk IO, etc, in order to explore which code tweaks will have the biggest relative impact on your workload. It would let you do a bunch of your testing and optimization locally, for free. Could be an edge to distinguish you from the competition, although I'm not sure it's a big enough one to warrant a business case. Maybe it would be attractive to shops whose development costs are high compared to production (i.e. startups and enterprises with lots of ongoing customization), but probably not so much for the established, internet-based businesses where I'm guessing the big money is (like Netflix).

andrewxdiamond 7y ago
Maybe not to the extent you want, but Azure Stack lets you run many types of cloud infrastructure on site, including production workloads, for a small fee. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/azure-stack/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/azure-stack/

colecut 7y ago

Whats wrong with the guys that made Fortnite? I think their business model is genius. Make a free game, capable of cross-platform multiplayer across nearly all devices, and let people waste their money on skins and dances that give no competitive edge if they want to.