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Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing

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Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing

#31
post #22

I have posted a few times about how absurdly expensive all the cloud providers are. If you have a baseline load you should be co-locating bare metal. Any excess capacity you need should spill over into your AWS/GCE/Azure account. For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s bl…

you can also pickup an enterprise flash device and have a few terabytes of 500k+IOPs for a few grand whereas reaching a similar performance profile via provisioned IOPs will cost you 10x as much every month.

You're comparing apples to oranges -- if you want a couple TB of locally attached storage, you'd get an i3.2xlarge for $450/month with 1.9TB of NVMe SSD (plus 8 cores CPU + 60GB RAM).

Using EBS volumes with provisioned IOPS give you some advantages that you don't get with a bare SSD -- like snapshot support and the ability to easily detach it and move it to another server.

Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing

#32
post #19

I have posted a few times about how absurdly expensive all the cloud providers are. If you have a baseline load you should be co-locating bare metal. Any excess capacity you need should spill over into your AWS/GCE/Azure account. For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s bl…

> You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s blended bandwidth connection billed at the 95th percentile for $150/month. And then magically maintain it for free?

hopefully with your spare 3437 dollars a month you could figure out how to ever maintain such a thing.

Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing

#33
post #12

Keep in mind that with cloud providers you're also paying for the SDN that makes dynamic provisioning of VMs and logical network segmentation possible. Scalable SDN is much harder / more expensive than traditional networking.

4 to 5 times more expensive?

I'm not an expert, but it's possible... from what I understand amazon does SDN on CPUs in Dom0, Microsoft uses FPGAs, and Google has burnt their own ASICs... those are all expensive options. Much more expensive than generic networking gear. Possibly 4-5x, but idunno...

Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing

#34
"Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Gloud Platform are all seriously screwing their customers over when it comes to bandwidth charges."

Disagree. There's no false advertising here, they're making you pay for their service and convenience of using a combined [Paas, Iaas, Saas ..etc]. It's unfair to view these services as a singular function, you typically touch MANY features/products in production. The cost includes the convenience of offering everything under one roof, because, face it, doing everything by yourself at the SLAs provided by the giants is no trivial task.

Unless you're a BIG company that likes to distract itself with infrastructure instead of building and sharpening the core offerings, chances are that you will NEVER really build anything as reliable, inter-operable, configurable and manageable at cost.

Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing

#35
While public bandwidth is indeed significantly more expensive on clouds, not all traffic needs to be public and different clouds charge different amounts.

I wrote a blog post on Google Cloud latency and pricing across zones and regions which may be useful for others:

https://blog.elasticbyte.net/comparing-bandwidth-prices-and-...

Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing

#36

How is this is a surprise to anyone? The big players are all pushing their clouds because its a cash bonanza. It's the SaaS model for hardware, make money forever because your customers never own anything. I've done the math many times and it's orders of magnitude cheaper to colocate as long as you can afford an IT guy and the upfront cost of hardware.

Theres other hidden costs as well. What happens when a harddrive fails in your colo? Unless you have best practice backups, you will lose customer data and trust. GCloud abstracts the issue of hardware so you can focus on real business development. And to some, that's worth the cost until they can properly afford all the hidden costs of independent hosting.

These are solved problems though. RAID works great around 99% of the time and for the others you can use off-site backup. It's extremely rare that something needs a true 100% uptime. Salesforce and Reddit still go down for maintenance windows in 2017. For one project I setup log streaming with Postgres to the cloud(since inbound BW is free :) ) and ran a hot backup there just in case.

Really though in my experience the cloud is far less reliable than colocation. I've had AWS VMs "degrade" or randomly die countless times but I can't remember the last time my Colo boxes went down, probably not since I last upgraded the OS.

Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure which region you priced, but an m4.16xlarge in us-east-1 (Virginia) is $3.20/hour, or $2304/month. But if you are comparing it to a purchased server, you ought to be looking at Reserve pricing, a 1 year reserved instance is $16K/year, 3 years is $32K (or you can pay monthly if you want). Still not as cheap as owning the server, but not quite as bad.

I had selected a dedicated instance. It's been my experience the difference in performance between dedicated and non dedicated is dramatic. edit: I had selected a dedicated instance in order to compare apples to apples. By definition you don't share a colo server.

this is not true, there should be no difference

Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing

#38
post #12

Keep in mind that with cloud providers you're also paying for the SDN that makes dynamic provisioning of VMs and logical network segmentation possible. Scalable SDN is much harder / more expensive than traditional networking.

According to whom?

Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing

#39
It's suffice to say that the cloud providers have a different set of customers in mind. I have servers on both OVH/Linode variety of service providers as well as one single app running on AWS. For the products I run on OVH/Linode, I sell the service at less than $20/month. The one on AWS sells for $200+ per month. Again, it's because of the requirements/SLAs. Based on experience, AWS is a lot more robust for what I'm using it for.

Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing

#40

I have posted a few times about how absurdly expensive all the cloud providers are. If you have a baseline load you should be co-locating bare metal. Any excess capacity you need should spill over into your AWS/GCE/Azure account. For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s bl…

[Off Topic] I have a chrome extension that replaces all occurrences of "the cloud" with "my butt".

It is the best extension.

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