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It's difficult to top AWS just based on an apples-to-apples comparison of buying servers versus turning up EC2 instances. EC2 is pretty price aggressive if you

by skuhn 12y ago

It's difficult to top AWS just based on an apples-to-apples comparison of buying servers versus turning up EC2 instances. EC2 is pretty price aggressive if you know what your needs are, identify an instance type that fits well, and reserve it for 3 years. A lot of people don't actually achieve all three, but it's often possible. Most comparisons overlook the crucial price differentiator between AWS and a datacenter build: bandwidth costs. AWS bills based on bytes transferred, every IP transit provider bills by 95th percentile or similar. A 1 gig commit on a 10 gig circuit is $1-2/meg in a well served on-net building, so let's say $2000/mo. The switch is $5000 or so, something that can't do full table BGP but is layer 3 capable, and support is $1000/yr. The cross connect is $300/mo. Plus a little bit more for optics and fiber. Over three years the cost is $91,000 (plus power to run the switch), if you never go above the 1 gig commit. Seems like a lot of money right? Compare this to transferring 500mbit/s constantly to the Internet over 3 years at AWS pricing. That amounts to 156 TB / month transferred. Per month that will cost $11,878.40. Over 3 years the cost is $427,622.40. There are some other key differences between AWS and datacenters: - it puts all of your spending into opex, eliminating capex (this matters for some businesses); - it limits the ways you can solve problems, there's no VRRP support for example, which is very limiting for a lot of service types; - there is no ability to peer or receive settlement free transit if you deploy in AWS However, in terms of raw dollars, the method that AWS uses to bill bandwidth consumption is always the major cost differentiator.

deleted 12y ago
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athrun 12y ago
The bandwidth between AWS regions and Cloudfront is free so you can save a lot here as well while improving performance for your end users. And on the Cloudfront side, you can negotiate pricing to further reduce the cost. Edit with Source: Cloudfront pricing page: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ "If you are using an AWS origin, effective December 1, 2014, data transferred from origin to edge locations (Amazon CloudFront "origin fetches") will be free of charge."
- skuhn 12y ago
  Cloudfront is cheaper, that is true. The same 500mbit/s outbound via Cloudfront is $381,173 for 3 years at list prices. I think that this has given Cloudfront an enormous pricing advantage in the CDN market, considering that using any other CDN means paying EC2/S3-outbound plus the third-party CDN's prices. If your content is highly cacheable, you can still use a third-party CDN and come out ahead. Since your EC2/S3 outbound will be 1/100th or 1/1000th of the total outbound, it starts to not really matter. For dynamic content, you're essentially being double billed, which is undesirable. Either way, you're not going to get content out of AWS for an order of magnitude less money, which is what you can get in a conventional datacenter build. AWS is billing CDN-style: per byte transferred. When combined with the hit rate, this makes some amount of sense for a CDN service (like Cloudfront): every byte transferred has an impact on the edge caches. I don't think that it makes much sense to bill EC2 bandwidth this way, but since people are obviously willing to pay it, Amazon has no real incentive to restructure their pricing. This practice is probably the single largest source of lock-in for AWS, even above all of their hosted services like ELB and SQS. It's also why startups that run out of money sometimes can't let people take their data (photos or whatever): they simply can't afford the outbound bandwidth fees.

by skuhn 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

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athrun 12y ago

The bandwidth between AWS regions and Cloudfront is free so you can save a lot here as well while improving performance for your end users. And on the Cloudfront side, you can negotiate pricing to further reduce the cost. Edit with Source: Cloudfront pricing page: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ "If you are using an AWS origin, effective December 1, 2014, data transferred from origin to edge locations (Amazon CloudFront "origin fetches") will be free of charge."

skuhn 12y ago
Cloudfront is cheaper, that is true. The same 500mbit/s outbound via Cloudfront is $381,173 for 3 years at list prices. I think that this has given Cloudfront an enormous pricing advantage in the CDN market, considering that using any other CDN means paying EC2/S3-outbound plus the third-party CDN's prices. If your content is highly cacheable, you can still use a third-party CDN and come out ahead. Since your EC2/S3 outbound will be 1/100th or 1/1000th of the total outbound, it starts to not really matter. For dynamic content, you're essentially being double billed, which is undesirable. Either way, you're not going to get content out of AWS for an order of magnitude less money, which is what you can get in a conventional datacenter build. AWS is billing CDN-style: per byte transferred. When combined with the hit rate, this makes some amount of sense for a CDN service (like Cloudfront): every byte transferred has an impact on the edge caches. I don't think that it makes much sense to bill EC2 bandwidth this way, but since people are obviously willing to pay it, Amazon has no real incentive to restructure their pricing. This practice is probably the single largest source of lock-in for AWS, even above all of their hosted services like ELB and SQS. It's also why startups that run out of money sometimes can't let people take their data (photos or whatever): they simply can't afford the outbound bandwidth fees.