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That's not correct. Cloud costs have steadily declined since ~ever. This is due both to the inevitable march of performance, and inflation. It used to be 1 Ivy

That's not correct. Cloud costs have steadily declined since ~ever. This is due both to the inevitable march of performance, and inflation. It used to be 1 Ivy Bridge vCPU cost $71/month, in 2014 dollars, or $90 today. But today you can get a machine of the same size class, with a dramatically faster CPU, at $30/month.

sltkr 3y ago
The metric we are interested in is cost relative to self-hosting on similar hardware. So you can't factor in things like inflation and hardware performance, which equally made self-hosted solutions cheaper.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  Good luck trying to write down that number. The cloud has list prices. Colo facilities can and will demand 500% rent increases when it's time to renew. You can't predict it.
  - Boatfaceing 3y ago
    [dead]
alright2565 3y ago
Using cpubenchmark.net - a Intel 3770K was released in 2012 for $330 retail, or 20 CPUMark/2012$. - a AMD 7800X3D was released in 2022 for $450 retail ($330 in 2012 dollars), or 105 CPUMark/2012$ or 77 CPUMark/2023$ Looks like consumer performance/price has improved by 5.3x. I'm not sure what exactly the math works out here for cloud hardware, since I don't really have any performance numbers. I'd still expect it to be quite a bit less improvement, since it "feels" like server CPUs have gotten better at cramming more cores on a die, rather than increase each core's performance. Looking at Xeon Platinum 8480+ (2023, MSRP $10k), there's 56 cores@3154 ST CPU Mark, vs. Xeon E7-8890 v2 (2014, MSRP $6.8k) has 15 cores@2175 ST CPU Mark. Assuming your cloud prices are correct, and with these rough performance figures, you're getting a 4.5x cloud performance/price improvement, significantly worse than with real hardware.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  The capex of the computer is only about a quarter of the TCO over a 3-year amortization. I don't think it is as relevant as you seem to believe. However, I have definitely seen some naive analyses along these lines written by people with a predisposition for moving out of clouds.

sltkr 3y ago

The metric we are interested in is cost relative to self-hosting on similar hardware. So you can't factor in things like inflation and hardware performance, which equally made self-hosted solutions cheaper.

jeffbee 3y ago
Good luck trying to write down that number. The cloud has list prices. Colo facilities can and will demand 500% rent increases when it's time to renew. You can't predict it.
- Boatfaceing 3y ago
  [dead]

alright2565 3y ago

Using cpubenchmark.net - a Intel 3770K was released in 2012 for $330 retail, or 20 CPUMark/2012$. - a AMD 7800X3D was released in 2022 for $450 retail ($330 in 2012 dollars), or 105 CPUMark/2012$ or 77 CPUMark/2023$ Looks like consumer performance/price has improved by 5.3x. I'm not sure what exactly the math works out here for cloud hardware, since I don't really have any performance numbers. I'd still expect it to be quite a bit less improvement, since it "feels" like server CPUs have gotten better at cramming more cores on a die, rather than increase each core's performance. Looking at Xeon Platinum 8480+ (2023, MSRP $10k), there's 56 cores@3154 ST CPU Mark, vs. Xeon E7-8890 v2 (2014, MSRP $6.8k) has 15 cores@2175 ST CPU Mark. Assuming your cloud prices are correct, and with these rough performance figures, you're getting a 4.5x cloud performance/price improvement, significantly worse than with real hardware.

jeffbee 3y ago
The capex of the computer is only about a quarter of the TCO over a 3-year amortization. I don't think it is as relevant as you seem to believe. However, I have definitely seen some naive analyses along these lines written by people with a predisposition for moving out of clouds.