4 ms·

The pricing just for the ingest seems way off. $0.002 for 10,000 metrics might not seem like much by even a simple node_exporter will grab 700 metrics every 15

by slyall 6y ago

The pricing just for the ingest seems way off. $0.002 for 10,000 metrics might not seem like much by even a simple node_exporter will grab 700 metrics every 15 seconds. Thats $24/month just to ingest the cpu/ram/diskspace data from each server. Plus storage and query costs. At work I have a single r4.xlarge instance handling 1.3 million metrics every 15 seconds. Storage is not clustered but cost is only $500/month. It would cost me $45k/month just for the ingest with the new managed service.

mchusma 6y ago
Their pricing for these managed services used to be "no brainer" (something like the cost of compute only, or maybe a <30% upcharge). Managed airflow was similarly very expensive (maybe 3x the cost). Just not worth it. Bummer.
- wpietri 6y ago
  Yeah, it turns out there's a lot of money to be made from people who don't have a good grasp of the fundamentals. We got a marketing email from Huggingface recently about their ML-models-as-a-service offering: https://huggingface.co/pricing https://huggingface.co/pricing One of my colleagues asked if it might be better than creating our own infrastructure for that. I ran the numbers for one of our recent jobs, feeding a million tweets to two ML models to see which worked better. That would have cost about $1800 on Huggingface. Using AWS spot instances, it was maybe $25 for us to run ourselves. Of course, we can do it at that price because we are paying for engineers and plan on classifying enormous amounts of text, so it works out for us. Plenty of other people probably should just use Huggingface. But I can't help looking at that 70x markup and think, "Fuck me? No, fuck you!"
throwaway343233 6y ago
Pricing makes sense if you consider how Amazon operates at this point. You put basically a MVP product out there with abnormal pricing. Your enterprise customers that are drowning in money can start using it and using that money you can grow your org by hiring more engineers. At this point you start working on adding new features and do cost optimization. Since your whole architecture was designed based on "we have to ship this ASAP", you deliver some real nice cost reduction easily. Then you reflect this to your customers and gain goodwill and good PR.
- andrewstuart2 6y ago
  And let's be honest. We all know a company or two that would throw _way_ more than 45k/year at a global metrics solution to handle that volume, and still wind up with a flaming scrap heap. And a promotion or two.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    uhh, the GP said $45k/month, so that's $540k/year. I've worked at some large companies, and none would accept that as a cost baseline for basic metrics. But if you said, "We'll cap it at $200k for 5,000 servers" then it gets more interesting. The exceptions are if they're in a NewRelic or Splunk-type $$$$ deal: 1) they might save money by migrating or 2) they might use the lower cost to re-negotiate their Cadillac deals. If you've used Cloudwatch at a medium or large-scale metrics and alerting, please post a comment how that worked out. I find their features/graphs too minimal, but I've never been forced to make it work as the sole metrics/monitoring/alerting tool. (New managers always parrot, "Let's just use Cloudwatch!" their first month on the job, but then reality sinks in and any existing monitoring solution is by far the least of their problems. My favorite question to ask is, "So how do we migrate these existing dashboards that everybody uses? Ever done that?" followed by icy silence.)
- ec109685 6y ago
  I don’t think any company is drowning in money. Everyone has a budget they are working against. At the end of the day, you can bite an engineer or pay aws more. It’s all a trade off.
kobalsky 6y ago
both google and amazon are insane with their observability services. we ran away screaming from stackdriver when we saw how costs started piling up. thank god for prometheus and grafana.
gautamdivgi 6y ago
Pricing makes sense for enterprises. Considering that you may need a team (or a part of one) to maintain a self-hosted cluster at possibly 0.995 reliability, do upgrades, manage devs, run all the mandatory security scans, justify why some enterprise scan tool throwing errors isn't an issue, etc. Oh also justify why you need the manpower to do it, at which point your VP will tell you to just use the managed service.
- qz2 6y ago
  It doesn’t though. I just did a cost projection on our estate and hiring two engineers to look after it on bare metal VMs is 30% cheaper than using the managed service. Plus it doesn’t require a lot of maintenance so we can use those guys on improving the product as well which actually gives direct customer benefits.
potamic 6y ago
That's probably lesser than your team's payroll budget :) Their positioning is that you can reduce the staff needed to operate and maintain these instances.

by slyall 6y ago

mchusma 6y ago

Their pricing for these managed services used to be "no brainer" (something like the cost of compute only, or maybe a <30% upcharge). Managed airflow was similarly very expensive (maybe 3x the cost). Just not worth it. Bummer.

wpietri 6y ago
Yeah, it turns out there's a lot of money to be made from people who don't have a good grasp of the fundamentals. We got a marketing email from Huggingface recently about their ML-models-as-a-service offering: https://huggingface.co/pricing https://huggingface.co/pricing One of my colleagues asked if it might be better than creating our own infrastructure for that. I ran the numbers for one of our recent jobs, feeding a million tweets to two ML models to see which worked better. That would have cost about $1800 on Huggingface. Using AWS spot instances, it was maybe $25 for us to run ourselves. Of course, we can do it at that price because we are paying for engineers and plan on classifying enormous amounts of text, so it works out for us. Plenty of other people probably should just use Huggingface. But I can't help looking at that 70x markup and think, "Fuck me? No, fuck you!"

throwaway343233 6y ago

Pricing makes sense if you consider how Amazon operates at this point. You put basically a MVP product out there with abnormal pricing. Your enterprise customers that are drowning in money can start using it and using that money you can grow your org by hiring more engineers. At this point you start working on adding new features and do cost optimization. Since your whole architecture was designed based on "we have to ship this ASAP", you deliver some real nice cost reduction easily. Then you reflect this to your customers and gain goodwill and good PR.

andrewstuart2 6y ago
And let's be honest. We all know a company or two that would throw _way_ more than 45k/year at a global metrics solution to handle that volume, and still wind up with a flaming scrap heap. And a promotion or two.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  uhh, the GP said $45k/month, so that's $540k/year. I've worked at some large companies, and none would accept that as a cost baseline for basic metrics. But if you said, "We'll cap it at $200k for 5,000 servers" then it gets more interesting. The exceptions are if they're in a NewRelic or Splunk-type $$$$ deal: 1) they might save money by migrating or 2) they might use the lower cost to re-negotiate their Cadillac deals. If you've used Cloudwatch at a medium or large-scale metrics and alerting, please post a comment how that worked out. I find their features/graphs too minimal, but I've never been forced to make it work as the sole metrics/monitoring/alerting tool. (New managers always parrot, "Let's just use Cloudwatch!" their first month on the job, but then reality sinks in and any existing monitoring solution is by far the least of their problems. My favorite question to ask is, "So how do we migrate these existing dashboards that everybody uses? Ever done that?" followed by icy silence.)
ec109685 6y ago
I don’t think any company is drowning in money. Everyone has a budget they are working against. At the end of the day, you can bite an engineer or pay aws more. It’s all a trade off.

kobalsky 6y ago

both google and amazon are insane with their observability services. we ran away screaming from stackdriver when we saw how costs started piling up. thank god for prometheus and grafana.

gautamdivgi 6y ago

Pricing makes sense for enterprises. Considering that you may need a team (or a part of one) to maintain a self-hosted cluster at possibly 0.995 reliability, do upgrades, manage devs, run all the mandatory security scans, justify why some enterprise scan tool throwing errors isn't an issue, etc. Oh also justify why you need the manpower to do it, at which point your VP will tell you to just use the managed service.

qz2 6y ago
It doesn’t though. I just did a cost projection on our estate and hiring two engineers to look after it on bare metal VMs is 30% cheaper than using the managed service. Plus it doesn’t require a lot of maintenance so we can use those guys on improving the product as well which actually gives direct customer benefits.

potamic 6y ago

That's probably lesser than your team's payroll budget :) Their positioning is that you can reduce the staff needed to operate and maintain these instances.