4 ms·

AWS Outposts 2021: Stories for Folks Who Love Spreadsheets

48 points by jen20 6y ago

thom 6y ago
You can’t read Medium without an app or logging in anymore?!
- wmf 6y ago
  I was able to read it but I have various ad-blocking and paywall-busting extensions installed.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ibatindev 6y ago
  For me, uBlock Origin with JavaScript disabled works all the time.
- dionys 6y ago
  I've started using Incognito mode whenever I find an article from Medium and it works
- zwaps 6y ago
  It's also paywalled for me, despite all the usual blocking addons. Opening in a private tab works.
baskire 6y ago
Outposts might be priced higher to reduce demand. Allowing them time to iron out the kinks. It’s a common pattern where you aren’t yet ready to scale up to handle the demand at a lower price point.
- tyingq 6y ago
  I think they are also trying to balance not losing money since there's no egress charges for data coming out of the Outpost and into the customer's data center. I imagine for some use cases, that cannibalizes some revenue.
boulos 6y ago
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Adam’s conclusion: > I understand why customers want Outposts. Despite the grousing in this post, I’m an AWS fan and have tremendous respect for their rate of innovation. Customers want API-driven infrastructure, the flexibility and speed of development that it provides. Traditional on-premises vendors, most concisely represented by the EMC/Dell/VMware conglomerate, have failed to evolve their way into this experience which is why the hardware and software from the hyperscalers (including Outposts) looks quite different. Customers are faced with a literal dilemma: on one hand they can continue buying the moderately priced, expensive to operate, inefficient to use, legacy gear from Dell/HPE/etc or they can pay exorbitantly for something like AWS Outposts. The former is throwing good money after bad, investing in an ecosystem that has continued to underdeliver; the latter cedes more and more control to AWS and locks them into an unaffordable future. is a big reason for why I cared about making GKE on-prem / bare metal a thing: I don’t believe (most) customers on-prem want to buy new hardware from a cloud provider. They mostly want to have consistent API-driven infrastructure with their hybrid cloud setup, and don’t want to burn their millions of dollars of equipment to the ground to do so. I recognize that Oxide’s bet is that customers will prefer to stay on-premises if they can get cheaper / “better” hardware. That’s an interesting thesis! But many folks really want nothing to do with owning and managing infrastructure, they just feel forced to do so (and I agree with Adam here, it’s non trivially about the economics). Edit to add: I commonly troll people with dell.com list prices, combined with colo provider cost of power, percentage spare, redundant networking. A pile of boxes != Cloud, but that is what companies want to compare to (the crossing point is not same cost, but it’s also not some huge integer multiple if your cost of infrastructure matters to you; for some businesses infrastructure costs do not matter, anymore than their power bill does).
- wmf 6y ago
  Anthos certainly has a different (one might say opposite) approach to Outposts. I was surprised that Anthos apparently doesn't use the GCE hypervisor, control plane, or Container-Optimized OS. Is the customer fully responsible for hardware management, OS/hypervisor installation/management, patching, etc? Does all that work end up negating the benefits of consistent API-driven infrastructure?
wmf 6y ago
The $80K rack overhead pays for the AWS control plane. You can't get a working, fully managed OpenStack or vCloud installation for $27K/year. Every "private cloud" available now is overpriced shit. Outposts is designed to be cheaper than its competition, not radically cheap. Also, does the $80K rack overhead include switches? That's around $30K. Does it include EBS? etc.
- ec109685 6y ago
  With AWS, you are only leasing the system for 3 years, so the $30k comparison for the switch isn’t apples to apples.
unclekev 6y ago
Article is behind a pay wall > Not every story on Medium is free, like this one. Become a member to get unlimited access and support the voices you want to hear more from.
- tyingq 6y ago
  This worked for me: https://outline.com/aey3xV https://outline.com/aey3xV
- imglorp 6y ago
  Sometimes you can wipe out medium cookies--or block them from be placed--and get through.
trhway 6y ago
It sounds on the scale of Oracle Exadata, not surprising given the same target large enterprise and government customer.
marcinzm 6y ago
In my experience, AWS tends to price things high to begin with and then lower the price with time rather than risking underpricing a thing. I can imagine that support costs can be quiet high with a service like this.
tormeh 6y ago
Reminder that cloud providers like Scaleway and Hetzner are 4-6x cheaper than AWS, although not as feature-rich. And bandwidth is typically included to a certain extent, or free.
Aeolun 6y ago
It seems outposts are more or less priced as 3 year contracts for similar instances (bar some outliers)? Is the author here just outraged over the fact that AWS is charging AWS prices? The prices in this article don’t seem that crazy to me considering you are already paying them for multiple c5.24XLarge instances.

48 points by jen20 6y ago

thom 6y ago

You can’t read Medium without an app or logging in anymore?!

wmf 6y ago
I was able to read it but I have various ad-blocking and paywall-busting extensions installed.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ibatindev 6y ago
For me, uBlock Origin with JavaScript disabled works all the time.
dionys 6y ago
I've started using Incognito mode whenever I find an article from Medium and it works
zwaps 6y ago
It's also paywalled for me, despite all the usual blocking addons. Opening in a private tab works.

baskire 6y ago

Outposts might be priced higher to reduce demand. Allowing them time to iron out the kinks. It’s a common pattern where you aren’t yet ready to scale up to handle the demand at a lower price point.

tyingq 6y ago
I think they are also trying to balance not losing money since there's no egress charges for data coming out of the Outpost and into the customer's data center. I imagine for some use cases, that cannibalizes some revenue.

boulos 6y ago

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Adam’s conclusion: > I understand why customers want Outposts. Despite the grousing in this post, I’m an AWS fan and have tremendous respect for their rate of innovation. Customers want API-driven infrastructure, the flexibility and speed of development that it provides. Traditional on-premises vendors, most concisely represented by the EMC/Dell/VMware conglomerate, have failed to evolve their way into this experience which is why the hardware and software from the hyperscalers (including Outposts) looks quite different. Customers are faced with a literal dilemma: on one hand they can continue buying the moderately priced, expensive to operate, inefficient to use, legacy gear from Dell/HPE/etc or they can pay exorbitantly for something like AWS Outposts. The former is throwing good money after bad, investing in an ecosystem that has continued to underdeliver; the latter cedes more and more control to AWS and locks them into an unaffordable future. is a big reason for why I cared about making GKE on-prem / bare metal a thing: I don’t believe (most) customers on-prem want to buy new hardware from a cloud provider. They mostly want to have consistent API-driven infrastructure with their hybrid cloud setup, and don’t want to burn their millions of dollars of equipment to the ground to do so. I recognize that Oxide’s bet is that customers will prefer to stay on-premises if they can get cheaper / “better” hardware. That’s an interesting thesis! But many folks really want nothing to do with owning and managing infrastructure, they just feel forced to do so (and I agree with Adam here, it’s non trivially about the economics). Edit to add: I commonly troll people with dell.com list prices, combined with colo provider cost of power, percentage spare, redundant networking. A pile of boxes != Cloud, but that is what companies want to compare to (the crossing point is not same cost, but it’s also not some huge integer multiple if your cost of infrastructure matters to you; for some businesses infrastructure costs do not matter, anymore than their power bill does).

wmf 6y ago
Anthos certainly has a different (one might say opposite) approach to Outposts. I was surprised that Anthos apparently doesn't use the GCE hypervisor, control plane, or Container-Optimized OS. Is the customer fully responsible for hardware management, OS/hypervisor installation/management, patching, etc? Does all that work end up negating the benefits of consistent API-driven infrastructure?

wmf 6y ago

The $80K rack overhead pays for the AWS control plane. You can't get a working, fully managed OpenStack or vCloud installation for $27K/year. Every "private cloud" available now is overpriced shit. Outposts is designed to be cheaper than its competition, not radically cheap. Also, does the $80K rack overhead include switches? That's around $30K. Does it include EBS? etc.

ec109685 6y ago
With AWS, you are only leasing the system for 3 years, so the $30k comparison for the switch isn’t apples to apples.

unclekev 6y ago

Article is behind a pay wall > Not every story on Medium is free, like this one. Become a member to get unlimited access and support the voices you want to hear more from.

tyingq 6y ago
This worked for me: https://outline.com/aey3xV https://outline.com/aey3xV
imglorp 6y ago
Sometimes you can wipe out medium cookies--or block them from be placed--and get through.

trhway 6y ago

It sounds on the scale of Oracle Exadata, not surprising given the same target large enterprise and government customer.

marcinzm 6y ago

In my experience, AWS tends to price things high to begin with and then lower the price with time rather than risking underpricing a thing. I can imagine that support costs can be quiet high with a service like this.

tormeh 6y ago

Reminder that cloud providers like Scaleway and Hetzner are 4-6x cheaper than AWS, although not as feature-rich. And bandwidth is typically included to a certain extent, or free.

Aeolun 6y ago

It seems outposts are more or less priced as 3 year contracts for similar instances (bar some outliers)? Is the author here just outraged over the fact that AWS is charging AWS prices? The prices in this article don’t seem that crazy to me considering you are already paying them for multiple c5.24XLarge instances.