4 ms·

Compare their cost reductions with the decrease in computing costs and you'll very rapidly discover that they don't actually pass on savings to customers. Quite

Compare their cost reductions with the decrease in computing costs and you'll very rapidly discover that they don't actually pass on savings to customers. Quite the opposite.

dmourati 13y ago
E.g.: http://diversitynet.zippykidcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/image.png http://diversitynet.zippykidcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/...
- kbenson 13y ago
  Is that assuming they are replacing all existing hardware with newer models as they become available, or is it based on some reported replacement schedule Amazon has stated? Also, is it based on Moore, or the actual market prices? I would expect their costs are based on the mixture of systems they have in place and for it to go down somewhat similar to the market cost for the component, but with a somewhat large lag time as older systems are phased out and newer ones phased in.
  - gtaylor 13y ago
    You're paying for a lot more than just the hardware your instance runs on with EC2. You're also indirectly paying for the other systems they make available to you within EC2 (auto-scaling, ELB, EBS, CloudWatch, etc). If you don't need these additional services, AWS is indeed a bad value. If you use a good chunk of them like we do, it's money well spent, though it won't fit neatly into graphs like the previously mentioned one.
gtaylor 13y ago
I mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, but you pay the premium with EC2 for flexibility, not so much for raw computing power. If you don't need to be able to scale up AND down with regularity, EC2 is indeed a lot more expensive (since you're not considering the core advantage of EC2 in that case). There are a ton of simple VPS providers that would probably get you closer to the baseline for computing costs, but to be fair, those providers are a completely different beast.

4 ms·

Compare their cost reductions with the decrease in computing costs and you'll very rapidly discover that they don't actually pass on savings to customers. Quite

by imbriaco 13y ago

Compare their cost reductions with the decrease in computing costs and you'll very rapidly discover that they don't actually pass on savings to customers. Quite the opposite.

dmourati 13y ago
E.g.: http://diversitynet.zippykidcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/image.png http://diversitynet.zippykidcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/...
- kbenson 13y ago
  Is that assuming they are replacing all existing hardware with newer models as they become available, or is it based on some reported replacement schedule Amazon has stated? Also, is it based on Moore, or the actual market prices? I would expect their costs are based on the mixture of systems they have in place and for it to go down somewhat similar to the market cost for the component, but with a somewhat large lag time as older systems are phased out and newer ones phased in.
  - gtaylor 13y ago
    You're paying for a lot more than just the hardware your instance runs on with EC2. You're also indirectly paying for the other systems they make available to you within EC2 (auto-scaling, ELB, EBS, CloudWatch, etc). If you don't need these additional services, AWS is indeed a bad value. If you use a good chunk of them like we do, it's money well spent, though it won't fit neatly into graphs like the previously mentioned one.
gtaylor 13y ago
I mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, but you pay the premium with EC2 for flexibility, not so much for raw computing power. If you don't need to be able to scale up AND down with regularity, EC2 is indeed a lot more expensive (since you're not considering the core advantage of EC2 in that case). There are a ton of simple VPS providers that would probably get you closer to the baseline for computing costs, but to be fair, those providers are a completely different beast.