3 ms·

Right, but they add quite a bit of margin from what I see. Correct me if this comparison is not fair: Fly.io, 8 vCPUs, 32GB RAM (dedicated-cpu-8x): $398/mo AW

Right, but they add quite a bit of margin from what I see. Correct me if this comparison is not fair: Fly.io, 8 vCPUs, 32GB RAM (dedicated-cpu-8x): $398/mo AWS, 8 vCPUs, 32GB RAM (t3.2xlarge, us-east-2): $240/mo So, 65% more expensive. Quite steep.

OJFord 4y ago
PaaS is also always more expensive than IaaS (which as GP said is always more expensive than I not-aaS). They're charging you more for the convenience of `flyctl region add lhr` or whatever it is vs figuring out the routing & VPCs for example in AWS yourself. It's not all roses though, I find the docs a bit lacking (good on networking - bad on security & storage) and the price of that convenience (aside from literal price) is that it is limiting - as soon as you think 'well I just want a very simple firewall/security group wall' or 'what's the equivalent of allowing only this x to y with an IAM policy', nope, can't do it.
- thegeomaster 4y ago
  I know that, but I've never understood the PaaS model of just slapping X% on top of the underlying cloud cost. It just invites customers to migrate to the underlying cloud once they're big enough to hire and sustain a dedicated devops team and setup something like k8s. Surely the amortized costs of the Fly.io platform don't scale linearly with the power of the VMs you rent from them. A 64GiB server won't be twice as expensive to maintain as a 32GiB one. So why not create a model that e.g. consists of a cost per VM/autoscaling group/etc plus whatever the VMs cost? I'm genuinely interested, I could very well be missing something.
  - mrkurt 4y ago
    The costs of the VMs scale linearly. The bigger they get, the more additional capacity we need to be able to launch on demand ones. It's not just RAM, though, our physical servers have a consistent ratio of RAM/CPU/disk available. You're basically just buying slivers of hardware we've already paid for. That said, our pricing isn't far off of AWS. They have much better economies of scale than we do, and can afford to do Graviton, but you get pretty close horsepower per dollar for comparable instances.
- OJFord 4y ago
  Also, just for the record, I'm the sort of person that really dislikes magic command lines, I don't want docs that tell me do fly this or that. I want it to be possible in the web console (almost nothing is) and via the Terraform provider (glad it exists but frankly it's an alpha/WIP) and for parity vs the CLI in docs. I used it in above comment as a shorthand for the fact that such an API/functionality exists that you can just say to Fly.io (whether via CLI or ~better~ other means) 'hey stick this in a second region too'.
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    This phrasing of command-lines as magic is weird to me, with an obviously different background. I'd consider a command-line example more explicit in what it is doing than either a 5-step walkthrough of the web UI, or Terraform. flyctl is a reasonably simple GraphQL client. They haven't really documented the GraphQL API (see e.g. https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/custom-domains-with-fly/#graphql-api-notes https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/custom-domains-with-fly/#grap... for one slice of it), but that's all flyctl does.
cldellow 4y ago
That's not entirely fair. The AWS t family aren't dedicated CPUs. They're burstable, there is a token system that decides if you get to use them to full capacity and for how long: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/burstable-performance-instances.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/burstabl...
- thegeomaster 4y ago
  Thanks. Do you know which EC2 instance would be most comparable to what Fly is offering with their dedicated-cpu instances?
  - ctvo 4y ago
    Anything not these: > The EC2 burstable instances consist of T4g, T3a and T3 instance types, and the previous generation T2 instance types. Your point still stands. Here's a m6g.2xlarge with 32GiB of memory and 8 vCPUs (AWS Graviton2 Processor / arm64): https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/m6g.2xlarge?min_vcpus=8&region=us-east-2&cost_duration=monthly&selected=m6g.2xlarge&os=linux&reserved_term=Standard.noUpfront https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/m6g.2xlarge?min_vcpus=8... Monthly cost: $224.84
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - yencabulator 4y ago
      But then Gravitons are cheaper than x86. Though apparently the x86 variants are still only around $252.29/mo. Fly compares better on the low end of scale. AWS t3a.nano 512MB (2vcpu but 1h12min burst only, you can normally only consume 5% of that!) is $3.431/mo Fly shared-cpu-1x 512MB 1vcpu $3.19/mo
  - cldellow 4y ago
    Short answer: no. Long answer: When you consider ARM vs AMD vs Intel vs current-gen vs last-gen, AWS sells several 8-core 32-GB machines that have wildly varying performance characteristics. It used to be that the manner of virtualization impacted performance, too. I think that might be less the case now. To know if you're getting good value, you really need to try a few different vendors and benchmark then, either with real workloads or synthetic ones.
ericpauley 4y ago
A comparable would probably be m6a.2xlarge, still only $250. Larger burstables have higher baseline cpu so they’re more like dedicated CPU, hence the low price difference.

OJFord 4y ago

PaaS is also always more expensive than IaaS (which as GP said is always more expensive than I not-aaS). They're charging you more for the convenience of `flyctl region add lhr` or whatever it is vs figuring out the routing & VPCs for example in AWS yourself. It's not all roses though, I find the docs a bit lacking (good on networking - bad on security & storage) and the price of that convenience (aside from literal price) is that it is limiting - as soon as you think 'well I just want a very simple firewall/security group wall' or 'what's the equivalent of allowing only this x to y with an IAM policy', nope, can't do it.

thegeomaster 4y ago
I know that, but I've never understood the PaaS model of just slapping X% on top of the underlying cloud cost. It just invites customers to migrate to the underlying cloud once they're big enough to hire and sustain a dedicated devops team and setup something like k8s. Surely the amortized costs of the Fly.io platform don't scale linearly with the power of the VMs you rent from them. A 64GiB server won't be twice as expensive to maintain as a 32GiB one. So why not create a model that e.g. consists of a cost per VM/autoscaling group/etc plus whatever the VMs cost? I'm genuinely interested, I could very well be missing something.
- mrkurt 4y ago
  The costs of the VMs scale linearly. The bigger they get, the more additional capacity we need to be able to launch on demand ones. It's not just RAM, though, our physical servers have a consistent ratio of RAM/CPU/disk available. You're basically just buying slivers of hardware we've already paid for. That said, our pricing isn't far off of AWS. They have much better economies of scale than we do, and can afford to do Graviton, but you get pretty close horsepower per dollar for comparable instances.
OJFord 4y ago
Also, just for the record, I'm the sort of person that really dislikes magic command lines, I don't want docs that tell me do fly this or that. I want it to be possible in the web console (almost nothing is) and via the Terraform provider (glad it exists but frankly it's an alpha/WIP) and for parity vs the CLI in docs. I used it in above comment as a shorthand for the fact that such an API/functionality exists that you can just say to Fly.io (whether via CLI or ~better~ other means) 'hey stick this in a second region too'.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  This phrasing of command-lines as magic is weird to me, with an obviously different background. I'd consider a command-line example more explicit in what it is doing than either a 5-step walkthrough of the web UI, or Terraform. flyctl is a reasonably simple GraphQL client. They haven't really documented the GraphQL API (see e.g. https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/custom-domains-with-fly/#graphql-api-notes https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/custom-domains-with-fly/#grap... for one slice of it), but that's all flyctl does.

cldellow 4y ago

That's not entirely fair. The AWS t family aren't dedicated CPUs. They're burstable, there is a token system that decides if you get to use them to full capacity and for how long: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/burstable-performance-instances.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/burstabl...

thegeomaster 4y ago
Thanks. Do you know which EC2 instance would be most comparable to what Fly is offering with their dedicated-cpu instances?
- ctvo 4y ago
  Anything not these: > The EC2 burstable instances consist of T4g, T3a and T3 instance types, and the previous generation T2 instance types. Your point still stands. Here's a m6g.2xlarge with 32GiB of memory and 8 vCPUs (AWS Graviton2 Processor / arm64): https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/m6g.2xlarge?min_vcpus=8&region=us-east-2&cost_duration=monthly&selected=m6g.2xlarge&os=linux&reserved_term=Standard.noUpfront https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/m6g.2xlarge?min_vcpus=8... Monthly cost: $224.84
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    But then Gravitons are cheaper than x86. Though apparently the x86 variants are still only around $252.29/mo. Fly compares better on the low end of scale. AWS t3a.nano 512MB (2vcpu but 1h12min burst only, you can normally only consume 5% of that!) is $3.431/mo Fly shared-cpu-1x 512MB 1vcpu $3.19/mo
- cldellow 4y ago
  Short answer: no. Long answer: When you consider ARM vs AMD vs Intel vs current-gen vs last-gen, AWS sells several 8-core 32-GB machines that have wildly varying performance characteristics. It used to be that the manner of virtualization impacted performance, too. I think that might be less the case now. To know if you're getting good value, you really need to try a few different vendors and benchmark then, either with real workloads or synthetic ones.

ericpauley 4y ago

A comparable would probably be m6a.2xlarge, still only $250. Larger burstables have higher baseline cpu so they’re more like dedicated CPU, hence the low price difference.