4 ms·

I keep reading about people saying AWS is cheap. Do these people actually use AWS? Even with price drops, it will never be as cheap as buying a machine and st

I keep reading about people saying AWS is cheap. Do these people actually use AWS? Even with price drops, it will never be as cheap as buying a machine and sticking it in a co-lo and self managing it. The problem is that's a pain in the ass. The real reason why people use AWS is because it's convenient.

thathonkey 12y ago
aka cheaper?
chii 12y ago
> it will never be as cheap as buying a machine and sticking it in a co-lo and self managing it. if your definition of cheaper is having to cough up the large upfront capital to rent/buy a place, rent/buy a rack(s), and then pay somebody (or DIY) to install, hook up power and test disaster recovery options etc...then yes, it's cheaper.
- adventured 12y ago
  If you have a 5 or 10 person start-up, it's drastically cheaper to find a high quality dedicated host that can make sure all of that is operating for you. Unless you have very specialized needs of course. The amount of dedicated hardware you can rent for $1,000 per month is several times beyond what you can get from Amazon for the same price. And if you have a demand for lots of bandwidth, Amazon will cost more just on bandwidth than for the entire dedicated setup somewhere else. Amazon will drill you for $1,000+ for just 10tb of bandwidth alone. Today 10tb of bandwidth on a 1gbps line is almost the assumed base you get with a $100-$150 dedicated box.
prostoalex 12y ago
> as cheap as buying a machine and sticking it in a co-lo and self managing it For most companies out there, that involves hiring someone with Linux/Windows server management skills. Even in an engineering company, if you have a choice between spending engineer's time on engineering projects or system management, the company usually gets more bang for the buck for the former.
- latch 12y ago
  From personal experience, I've seen a correlation between software companies that "outsource" their devops and software companies that write bad software. This is more pronounced the more "magic" you get (Heroku for example). Put differently, the best backend developers are also the ones that can compile nginx from source (a rare talent nowadays apparently) and have it running reliably within the hour. Better by no small factor either. There's no shortage of them.
  - prostoalex 12y ago
    Yeah, the word "companies" describes everything from a one-man shop to Google, and at certain point a devops person/department/division is a must. Platform-as-a-service companies are trying to prolong that "certain point". A few years back you could have the same argument with an army of Exchange administrators who would point out how ridiculous it would be to trust your entire company's email infrastructure to Gmail, yet here we are.
  - andrioni 12y ago
    Isn't compiling nginx from source just a `./configure; make; make install`? I mean, any developer who has ever used a *nix-like probably knows the classical three-command incantation.
    - latch 12y ago
      Last time I was part of the process to interview devops, we asked this question (pairing remotely tmux'd into an ec2 instance). I think we went through 10 people before we found 1 that could do it. And, of course, when he did it, it took him like 5 minutes. Everyone else struggled. "but I use a package manager" was the most common complaint. You do need things like build-essential installed (which we'd let them install however they wanted). And a blank ./configure normally complains about missing pcre and maybe gzip (I forget). But we'd just tell them they could install without it (and the error message makes it very clear how to do that (--without-pcre or whatever). Very sad.
- Patrick_Devine 12y ago
adventured 12y ago
I think the price cutting / value proposition is beginning to finally outrun the needs that the extreme majority of sites might have. For most of the US Web, infrastructure demand is not growing, and neither is traffic (the principle that there are only so many hours to consume content, against a mostly maxed out user base). Your typical business web site, will never keep up with what Amazon is doing. So at some point in the next few years, Amazon will be both cheap enough and convenient, versus co-lo or dedicated. In the last year I've noticed AWS is finally catching my eye on price, and I'm a big co-lo self-managed fan due to the cost savings. In a few more years I could see myself switching everything over and not feeling bad about the cost. In that time Amazon's value proposition will chase down toward where Linode and Digital Ocean are at today. Let's say their system power (the sum of the hardware) will go up by 50% every year, while their prices fall 25% every year per 2014 defined unit of power. Even though I consider Amazon expensive today, it won't be long at this point before they start to outstrip my scale of service demand (I'll never be operating Twitter or Foursquare on AWS).
- Chevalier 12y ago
  The US market may not be growing, but the rest of the world will come online soon enough. And speaking from experience, most of the world lacks the infrastructure, climate, political stability, or protection from criminal activity to host individual server farms. If you're trying to start a business in India or Egypt, you're VASTLY better off outsourcing your IT to a dependable third party like AWS -- particularly as those costs drop over the next decade through economies of scale and technological progress. I'm sure the eventual goal is to sell AWS and its competitors as replacements for virtually all business IT and even personal computers -- even in stable Western countries. Current prices may have finally started to be competitive with local hosting, but we haven't even touched the potential of cloud computing yet.

thathonkey 12y ago

aka cheaper?

chii 12y ago

> it will never be as cheap as buying a machine and sticking it in a co-lo and self managing it. if your definition of cheaper is having to cough up the large upfront capital to rent/buy a place, rent/buy a rack(s), and then pay somebody (or DIY) to install, hook up power and test disaster recovery options etc...then yes, it's cheaper.

adventured 12y ago
If you have a 5 or 10 person start-up, it's drastically cheaper to find a high quality dedicated host that can make sure all of that is operating for you. Unless you have very specialized needs of course. The amount of dedicated hardware you can rent for $1,000 per month is several times beyond what you can get from Amazon for the same price. And if you have a demand for lots of bandwidth, Amazon will cost more just on bandwidth than for the entire dedicated setup somewhere else. Amazon will drill you for $1,000+ for just 10tb of bandwidth alone. Today 10tb of bandwidth on a 1gbps line is almost the assumed base you get with a $100-$150 dedicated box.

prostoalex 12y ago

> as cheap as buying a machine and sticking it in a co-lo and self managing it For most companies out there, that involves hiring someone with Linux/Windows server management skills. Even in an engineering company, if you have a choice between spending engineer's time on engineering projects or system management, the company usually gets more bang for the buck for the former.

latch 12y ago
From personal experience, I've seen a correlation between software companies that "outsource" their devops and software companies that write bad software. This is more pronounced the more "magic" you get (Heroku for example). Put differently, the best backend developers are also the ones that can compile nginx from source (a rare talent nowadays apparently) and have it running reliably within the hour. Better by no small factor either. There's no shortage of them.
- prostoalex 12y ago
  Yeah, the word "companies" describes everything from a one-man shop to Google, and at certain point a devops person/department/division is a must. Platform-as-a-service companies are trying to prolong that "certain point". A few years back you could have the same argument with an army of Exchange administrators who would point out how ridiculous it would be to trust your entire company's email infrastructure to Gmail, yet here we are.
- andrioni 12y ago
  Isn't compiling nginx from source just a `./configure; make; make install`? I mean, any developer who has ever used a *nix-like probably knows the classical three-command incantation.
  - latch 12y ago
    Last time I was part of the process to interview devops, we asked this question (pairing remotely tmux'd into an ec2 instance). I think we went through 10 people before we found 1 that could do it. And, of course, when he did it, it took him like 5 minutes. Everyone else struggled. "but I use a package manager" was the most common complaint. You do need things like build-essential installed (which we'd let them install however they wanted). And a blank ./configure normally complains about missing pcre and maybe gzip (I forget). But we'd just tell them they could install without it (and the error message makes it very clear how to do that (--without-pcre or whatever). Very sad.
Patrick_Devine 12y ago

adventured 12y ago

I think the price cutting / value proposition is beginning to finally outrun the needs that the extreme majority of sites might have. For most of the US Web, infrastructure demand is not growing, and neither is traffic (the principle that there are only so many hours to consume content, against a mostly maxed out user base). Your typical business web site, will never keep up with what Amazon is doing. So at some point in the next few years, Amazon will be both cheap enough and convenient, versus co-lo or dedicated. In the last year I've noticed AWS is finally catching my eye on price, and I'm a big co-lo self-managed fan due to the cost savings. In a few more years I could see myself switching everything over and not feeling bad about the cost. In that time Amazon's value proposition will chase down toward where Linode and Digital Ocean are at today. Let's say their system power (the sum of the hardware) will go up by 50% every year, while their prices fall 25% every year per 2014 defined unit of power. Even though I consider Amazon expensive today, it won't be long at this point before they start to outstrip my scale of service demand (I'll never be operating Twitter or Foursquare on AWS).

Chevalier 12y ago
The US market may not be growing, but the rest of the world will come online soon enough. And speaking from experience, most of the world lacks the infrastructure, climate, political stability, or protection from criminal activity to host individual server farms. If you're trying to start a business in India or Egypt, you're VASTLY better off outsourcing your IT to a dependable third party like AWS -- particularly as those costs drop over the next decade through economies of scale and technological progress. I'm sure the eventual goal is to sell AWS and its competitors as replacements for virtually all business IT and even personal computers -- even in stable Western countries. Current prices may have finally started to be competitive with local hosting, but we haven't even touched the potential of cloud computing yet.