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Wouldn't a slow boil have been better than a massive price hike? Raising the price by 50% would be palatable to most medium to large orgs as the cost to switch

Wouldn't a slow boil have been better than a massive price hike? Raising the price by 50% would be palatable to most medium to large orgs as the cost to switch is greater. And it would still net a nice chunk of change for Broadcom.

cjbgkagh 2y ago
That would give people time to leave, this is a gouging from people who are forced to pay because it takes them a long time to engineer around it. You cant repeatedly gouge them so better make it count.
- eastbound 2y ago
  Can’t wait to see when AWS does it. Because it will happen to others, to every single Cloud product. Or GitHub or Atlassian.
  - Syonyk 2y ago
    They've already long since done it. Cloud is staggeringly expensive compared to your own physical servers. Has been for all but trivial (almost toy) workloads since day 1. And that's before you pay for bandwidth. I was spending a decent chunk of change monthly on cloud boxes just for my personal hosting projects, and eventually realized I could get a stonking 1U box, colo at a local data center, pay for the server in the savings in a year or two, and have radically more capability in the deal. If you need a "droplet" type VM, with a gig of RAM, a couple gig of disk, and bandwidth, they're not bad. DigitalOcean works well for that, and is way cheaper on bandwidth than other places (1TB per droplet per month, combined pool). So I'll use that for basic proxy nodes and such. But if you start wanting lots of RAM (I run, among other things, a Matrix homeserver, and some game servers for friends, so RAM use goes up in a hurry), or disk measured in TB, cloud costs start to go vertical, in a hurry. It's really nice having a box with enough RAM I can just toss RAM at VMs, do offsite backup of "everything," etc. If you're spending more than a few hundred a month on cloud hosting, it's worth evaluating what a physical box would save you. //EDIT: By "go vertical," I mean "To get a cloud box with similar specs to what I racked up would be half the cost of the entire 1U, per month."
    - outworlder 2y ago
      The type of workloads large companies are dealing with have different constraints, compared to a homeserver and or minecraft box. Sure, we could use physical boxes. But those will go to procurement. The budget will have to be approved. Orders are sent to suppliers. Hardware arrives, it is a colo is not so bad, but it will be installed according to the colo timelines. If it's your own DC you may have staff on hand, or it could very likely be a third party, and now you have to work with them etc etc. It can easily take months for any non trivially sized company. In the meantime, _we need capacity now_ and customers won't wait. I can provision thousands of machines on demand with a simple pull request and they will be online in minutes. And I can do that without exceeding the pre-approved budget, because those machines may not be needed forever; as soon as they are no longer needed, they are destroyed very quickly. And then, a random machine fails somewhere. Do you have staff to detect and diagnose the problem? I don't care how good your monitoring system is, there are some thorny issues that are difficult to identify and fix without highly specialized staff on board. Staff that you are paying for. Me? I don't care. If a VM somewhere is misbehaving, it is automatically nuked. We don't care why it had issues (unless it's a recurring thing). That happens a few times daily when you have 5 to 6 digit number of machines, and that's either initiated by us when our system detect health check failures, or initiated by AWS (either planned or unplanned maintenance). Don't think just how much an individual machine costs. It's all the supporting personnel that matters, with their (expensive) specialized skills. Managing one machine is doable (I have a few servers at home). Managing 50k? You have a beefy team now, with many specialized skills. You are probably running more exotic hardware. You also need to measure apples to apples. You 'disk measured in TB' is a locally attached disk almost certainly. In the cloud, that's likely to be a network attached storage. That _is_ more expensive (try buying something similar for your home lab), but it gives a lot of flexibility, flexibility that may not be necessary in a homelab, but it is certainly needed in larger environments. That's what allows our VMs to be fungible and easily destroyed or recreated, as they themselves don't store any state. That storage will also be more resilient too (AWS EBS backs up snapshots on S3, with 11 nines of durability, and can automatically retrieve blocks if they go bad). That said, even for large enterprises, the AWS egress costs are extortionate (more so if you use their NAT gateways). And there could be uses for workloads that don't change too much where it might be a good idea to have a hybrid model, and some physical boxes (but please try to not make them pets!).
  - outworlder 2y ago
    > Can’t wait to see when AWS does it. AWS overcharges for traffic, specially traffic going out. However, they have repeatedly released instances that are cheaper than their predecessors (often, higher performing too). I don't think that's out of the goodness of their hearts, as it likely allows them to refresh their fleet more often than it would be the case otherwise. If you are large they will work with you on pretty sweet discounts. So far, there's been no indications that they will pull the same move. They might, but that would be surprising. VMWare has never been cheap though.
Syonyk 2y ago
I'm sure, according to their models (which may not have existed outside the head of some MBA sorts), this was the most profitable move, because, of course nobody would be able to move off VMWare! It's a vital infrastructure product, or something... Doesn't make any sense to me, but I'm not a corporate raider, either. I'd just be happy to help people port their internal tooling over to Xen or KVM...

cjbgkagh 2y ago

That would give people time to leave, this is a gouging from people who are forced to pay because it takes them a long time to engineer around it. You cant repeatedly gouge them so better make it count.

eastbound 2y ago
Can’t wait to see when AWS does it. Because it will happen to others, to every single Cloud product. Or GitHub or Atlassian.
- Syonyk 2y ago
  They've already long since done it. Cloud is staggeringly expensive compared to your own physical servers. Has been for all but trivial (almost toy) workloads since day 1. And that's before you pay for bandwidth. I was spending a decent chunk of change monthly on cloud boxes just for my personal hosting projects, and eventually realized I could get a stonking 1U box, colo at a local data center, pay for the server in the savings in a year or two, and have radically more capability in the deal. If you need a "droplet" type VM, with a gig of RAM, a couple gig of disk, and bandwidth, they're not bad. DigitalOcean works well for that, and is way cheaper on bandwidth than other places (1TB per droplet per month, combined pool). So I'll use that for basic proxy nodes and such. But if you start wanting lots of RAM (I run, among other things, a Matrix homeserver, and some game servers for friends, so RAM use goes up in a hurry), or disk measured in TB, cloud costs start to go vertical, in a hurry. It's really nice having a box with enough RAM I can just toss RAM at VMs, do offsite backup of "everything," etc. If you're spending more than a few hundred a month on cloud hosting, it's worth evaluating what a physical box would save you. //EDIT: By "go vertical," I mean "To get a cloud box with similar specs to what I racked up would be half the cost of the entire 1U, per month."
  - outworlder 2y ago
    The type of workloads large companies are dealing with have different constraints, compared to a homeserver and or minecraft box. Sure, we could use physical boxes. But those will go to procurement. The budget will have to be approved. Orders are sent to suppliers. Hardware arrives, it is a colo is not so bad, but it will be installed according to the colo timelines. If it's your own DC you may have staff on hand, or it could very likely be a third party, and now you have to work with them etc etc. It can easily take months for any non trivially sized company. In the meantime, _we need capacity now_ and customers won't wait. I can provision thousands of machines on demand with a simple pull request and they will be online in minutes. And I can do that without exceeding the pre-approved budget, because those machines may not be needed forever; as soon as they are no longer needed, they are destroyed very quickly. And then, a random machine fails somewhere. Do you have staff to detect and diagnose the problem? I don't care how good your monitoring system is, there are some thorny issues that are difficult to identify and fix without highly specialized staff on board. Staff that you are paying for. Me? I don't care. If a VM somewhere is misbehaving, it is automatically nuked. We don't care why it had issues (unless it's a recurring thing). That happens a few times daily when you have 5 to 6 digit number of machines, and that's either initiated by us when our system detect health check failures, or initiated by AWS (either planned or unplanned maintenance). Don't think just how much an individual machine costs. It's all the supporting personnel that matters, with their (expensive) specialized skills. Managing one machine is doable (I have a few servers at home). Managing 50k? You have a beefy team now, with many specialized skills. You are probably running more exotic hardware. You also need to measure apples to apples. You 'disk measured in TB' is a locally attached disk almost certainly. In the cloud, that's likely to be a network attached storage. That _is_ more expensive (try buying something similar for your home lab), but it gives a lot of flexibility, flexibility that may not be necessary in a homelab, but it is certainly needed in larger environments. That's what allows our VMs to be fungible and easily destroyed or recreated, as they themselves don't store any state. That storage will also be more resilient too (AWS EBS backs up snapshots on S3, with 11 nines of durability, and can automatically retrieve blocks if they go bad). That said, even for large enterprises, the AWS egress costs are extortionate (more so if you use their NAT gateways). And there could be uses for workloads that don't change too much where it might be a good idea to have a hybrid model, and some physical boxes (but please try to not make them pets!).
- outworlder 2y ago
  > Can’t wait to see when AWS does it. AWS overcharges for traffic, specially traffic going out. However, they have repeatedly released instances that are cheaper than their predecessors (often, higher performing too). I don't think that's out of the goodness of their hearts, as it likely allows them to refresh their fleet more often than it would be the case otherwise. If you are large they will work with you on pretty sweet discounts. So far, there's been no indications that they will pull the same move. They might, but that would be surprising. VMWare has never been cheap though.

Syonyk 2y ago

I'm sure, according to their models (which may not have existed outside the head of some MBA sorts), this was the most profitable move, because, of course nobody would be able to move off VMWare! It's a vital infrastructure product, or something... Doesn't make any sense to me, but I'm not a corporate raider, either. I'd just be happy to help people port their internal tooling over to Xen or KVM...