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>can afford a modest markup. I'm with you until that statement. AWS is nothing approaching "modest" in their markup. 20% minimum and typically much higher if

by tw04 6y ago

>can afford a modest markup. I'm with you until that statement. AWS is nothing approaching "modest" in their markup. 20% minimum and typically much higher if you know how to negotiate when purchasing your on-prem gear. And if you happen to be a shop that sweats assets for 7+ years that number starts being measured in the hundreds of percentage points more expensive.

whatshisface 6y ago
>And if you happen to be a shop that sweats assets for 7+ years that number starts being measured in the hundreds of percentage points more expensive. If you include the growth in electric efficiency over time, it can be bad to run old servers after a certain point.
nixgeek 6y ago
But again, is that comparable? Seems like apples versus oranges. What’s the connectivity into your 7+ year old asset cost? What about the space, power and cooling to provide it a home? What happens when your environment gets attacked by a volumetric DDOS, is that 100Mbps circuit going to get overwhelmed? I’m not arguing AWS is cheaper, simply that there are lots of things around the physical server which also have costs and complexities.
- tw04 6y ago
  >What’s the connectivity into your 7+ year old asset cost? What about the space, power and cooling to provide it a home? 10Gbe ethernet was standard in 2013/2014. Space power and cooling is company dependent. If they're tiny, a closet in the building or a colocation facility, if they're larger, a room. If they're huge, a datacenter. >What happens when your environment gets attacked by a volumetric DDOS, is that 100Mbps circuit going to get overwhelmed? I can't recall the last time a customer got hit by a "volumetric DDoS". End-user facing systems sit behind cloudflare. Internal apps are... internal. Who cares if the WAN connection is getting hit by DDoS when your users are on campus? In post-covid world, they've got multiple tunnels with SD-WAN. That's ignoring that fact that Centurylink or Comcast or Telia are pretty good at mitigating DDoS in 2020. Just because they don't post about the attacks they endure on a blog doesn't mean they're inept. https://business.comcast.com/help-and-support/ethernet/comcast-business-ethernet-threat-management-service/ https://business.comcast.com/help-and-support/ethernet/comca... https://assets.centurylink.com/is/content/centurylink/centurylink-ddos-mitigation-service-data-sheet-1 https://assets.centurylink.com/is/content/centurylink/centur... >I’m not arguing AWS is cheaper, simply that there are lots of things around the physical server which also have costs and complexities. Sure, and they're all complexities which we solved 30+ years ago.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    > Sure, and they're all complexities which we solved 30+ years ago. The argument isn't that they are solved or not, but the cost of implementing and maintaining them vs AWS.
    - kikimora 6y ago
      I never say a whop running on AWS and not having a person managing it. Said person always has enough skill to replicate same setup on a dedicated hardware/VPS. I don't say such shops does not exists, it just I never saw them. To me AWS killer features are RDS and ability to provision 100 servers in a few minutes. Most of the time scaling is not needed and RDS alone cannot justify the cost of AWS.
drchopchop 6y ago
For a lot of companies, 20% is an acceptable markup to pay, in return for not having to deal with hardware failures, delays due to ordering new hardware, not always having instant failovers, over-purchasing for capacity/scale, the extra human dev ops costs, etc. If you're well-positioned to handle that, then great, AWS may not be cost-effective for you.
nemothekid 6y ago
>20% minimum and typically much higher if you know how to negotiate when purchasing your on-prem gear. A 20% premium on a $10k/mo server bill is an incredibly small premium to pay versus a single FTE.
- tw04 6y ago
  I have yet to move a single customer to Amazon that fired the FTE who was managing on-prem infrastructure and chalked it up to a cost-savings move. . The idea of cutting headcount is a fallacy. In small shops the guy that was managing on-prem infrastructure is now doing that (because it turns out you still need switches and phones and routers and firewalls even if you host things in AWS) as well as managing the AWS infrastructure. In large shops you're typically replacing "cheap" headcount (the guy who racked servers) with someone significantly more expensive (a team of cloud architects).
  - x0x0 6y ago
    We're a small company who avoided the hire. And we don't bother with a firewall at our office -- the only things on the office network are laptops, phones, printers, and sonos. Basically, if you model senior eng time as $5k/week -- not even counting the opportunity cost -- you'll understand why AWS. While I definitely think AWS is very expensive for the servers, they are not overall expensive. Again, setting up CloudWatch in an afternoon or dumping tons of heterogenous logs into S3 and querying them with Athena or spinning up full environment stacks (front end pool, back end pool, load balancers, databases, vpcs, vpns, etc) is an enormous cost savings vs finding, installing, configuring, and maintaining batches of software to do the same. edit: pay an eng $180k. Fully loaded, you're looking at $220k plus. Add in either recruiting time or a recruiting fee that probably runs us $2k/mo amortized over the first year on the low end. Add in the fact that the first 6 weeks weren't super productive, and also absorbed tons of time from other SE to get this person up to speed. Add in PM time bringing this person up to speed on our product. Yup, $5k/week.
    - hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
      $5k per week?
GordonS 6y ago
And on bandwidth their markup tends towards infinity - same on Azure and GCP. As a example, 20TB of egress bandwidth will cost you around $1,750 on Azure, almost $90/TB! Your typical server/VPS provider gives you that kind of bandwidth allowance for free, because it costs them close to nothing. I have a feeling almost all complaints about cloud costs would disappear forever if they'd only stop gouging customers on bandwidth. The likes of Hetzner and OVH are starting to offer more cloudy features, like load balancers and block storage. My hope is that eventually they become viable alternatives to the big 3, and they are finally forced to reduce their ludicrous bandwidth prices.
- hyperdimension 6y ago
  The term 'roach motel' comes to mind when I see their network traffic rates. "Come on in; there's no commitment. Pay as you go, and did I mention our ingress rates are free! Bring us your data and give the cloud a try. It's the future, you know..." "Oh you're leaving and want your data back now?"

by tw04 6y ago

whatshisface 6y ago

>And if you happen to be a shop that sweats assets for 7+ years that number starts being measured in the hundreds of percentage points more expensive. If you include the growth in electric efficiency over time, it can be bad to run old servers after a certain point.

nixgeek 6y ago

But again, is that comparable? Seems like apples versus oranges. What’s the connectivity into your 7+ year old asset cost? What about the space, power and cooling to provide it a home? What happens when your environment gets attacked by a volumetric DDOS, is that 100Mbps circuit going to get overwhelmed? I’m not arguing AWS is cheaper, simply that there are lots of things around the physical server which also have costs and complexities.

tw04 6y ago
>What’s the connectivity into your 7+ year old asset cost? What about the space, power and cooling to provide it a home? 10Gbe ethernet was standard in 2013/2014. Space power and cooling is company dependent. If they're tiny, a closet in the building or a colocation facility, if they're larger, a room. If they're huge, a datacenter. >What happens when your environment gets attacked by a volumetric DDOS, is that 100Mbps circuit going to get overwhelmed? I can't recall the last time a customer got hit by a "volumetric DDoS". End-user facing systems sit behind cloudflare. Internal apps are... internal. Who cares if the WAN connection is getting hit by DDoS when your users are on campus? In post-covid world, they've got multiple tunnels with SD-WAN. That's ignoring that fact that Centurylink or Comcast or Telia are pretty good at mitigating DDoS in 2020. Just because they don't post about the attacks they endure on a blog doesn't mean they're inept. https://business.comcast.com/help-and-support/ethernet/comcast-business-ethernet-threat-management-service/ https://business.comcast.com/help-and-support/ethernet/comca... https://assets.centurylink.com/is/content/centurylink/centurylink-ddos-mitigation-service-data-sheet-1 https://assets.centurylink.com/is/content/centurylink/centur... >I’m not arguing AWS is cheaper, simply that there are lots of things around the physical server which also have costs and complexities. Sure, and they're all complexities which we solved 30+ years ago.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  > Sure, and they're all complexities which we solved 30+ years ago. The argument isn't that they are solved or not, but the cost of implementing and maintaining them vs AWS.
  - kikimora 6y ago
    I never say a whop running on AWS and not having a person managing it. Said person always has enough skill to replicate same setup on a dedicated hardware/VPS. I don't say such shops does not exists, it just I never saw them. To me AWS killer features are RDS and ability to provision 100 servers in a few minutes. Most of the time scaling is not needed and RDS alone cannot justify the cost of AWS.

drchopchop 6y ago

For a lot of companies, 20% is an acceptable markup to pay, in return for not having to deal with hardware failures, delays due to ordering new hardware, not always having instant failovers, over-purchasing for capacity/scale, the extra human dev ops costs, etc. If you're well-positioned to handle that, then great, AWS may not be cost-effective for you.

nemothekid 6y ago

>20% minimum and typically much higher if you know how to negotiate when purchasing your on-prem gear. A 20% premium on a $10k/mo server bill is an incredibly small premium to pay versus a single FTE.

tw04 6y ago
I have yet to move a single customer to Amazon that fired the FTE who was managing on-prem infrastructure and chalked it up to a cost-savings move. . The idea of cutting headcount is a fallacy. In small shops the guy that was managing on-prem infrastructure is now doing that (because it turns out you still need switches and phones and routers and firewalls even if you host things in AWS) as well as managing the AWS infrastructure. In large shops you're typically replacing "cheap" headcount (the guy who racked servers) with someone significantly more expensive (a team of cloud architects).
- x0x0 6y ago
  We're a small company who avoided the hire. And we don't bother with a firewall at our office -- the only things on the office network are laptops, phones, printers, and sonos. Basically, if you model senior eng time as $5k/week -- not even counting the opportunity cost -- you'll understand why AWS. While I definitely think AWS is very expensive for the servers, they are not overall expensive. Again, setting up CloudWatch in an afternoon or dumping tons of heterogenous logs into S3 and querying them with Athena or spinning up full environment stacks (front end pool, back end pool, load balancers, databases, vpcs, vpns, etc) is an enormous cost savings vs finding, installing, configuring, and maintaining batches of software to do the same. edit: pay an eng $180k. Fully loaded, you're looking at $220k plus. Add in either recruiting time or a recruiting fee that probably runs us $2k/mo amortized over the first year on the low end. Add in the fact that the first 6 weeks weren't super productive, and also absorbed tons of time from other SE to get this person up to speed. Add in PM time bringing this person up to speed on our product. Yup, $5k/week.
  - hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
    $5k per week?

GordonS 6y ago

And on bandwidth their markup tends towards infinity - same on Azure and GCP. As a example, 20TB of egress bandwidth will cost you around $1,750 on Azure, almost $90/TB! Your typical server/VPS provider gives you that kind of bandwidth allowance for free, because it costs them close to nothing. I have a feeling almost all complaints about cloud costs would disappear forever if they'd only stop gouging customers on bandwidth. The likes of Hetzner and OVH are starting to offer more cloudy features, like load balancers and block storage. My hope is that eventually they become viable alternatives to the big 3, and they are finally forced to reduce their ludicrous bandwidth prices.

hyperdimension 6y ago
The term 'roach motel' comes to mind when I see their network traffic rates. "Come on in; there's no commitment. Pay as you go, and did I mention our ingress rates are free! Bring us your data and give the cloud a try. It's the future, you know..." "Oh you're leaving and want your data back now?"