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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

#41

Post by didip »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #7

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…

1. Will Dell servers magically appear in your racks all mounted correctly? Shipping delays is a very serious and real problem.

2. Will Dell servers arrived with 0 problems on its components? Any time I ordered meaningful amount of servers, I usually get about 5% fail rate. VMs aren't perfect but you can destroy and recreate in different region almost real time.

3. Ever had to deal with difficult-to-work-with network admin? The cloud is significantly less pain in the ass.

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

#42

Post by openasocket »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #26
Johnny555 wrote: post #23

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.

Why get a dedicated instance and not get reserve pricing? You can get those instances for a fraction of what you're currently paying

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

#44

Post by Johnny555 »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #26
Johnny555 wrote: post #23

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.

With an m4.16xl, there's no effective difference between a dedicated or default tenancy instance - only one .16xl can run on a physical hypervisor, which is reflected in the pricing, it's $3.20/hour whether it's dedicated or not:

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/dedicated-inst...

For smaller instances, there is around a 10% increase for dedicated, for example, for an m4.4xl, the price goes to $0.88 for dedicated tenancy versus $0.80 for default.

There is a $2/hour fee for each region in which you have dedicated instances, but that gets lost in the noise if you're using significant AWS resources. (it's $2/hour regardless of how many instances you're running)

We haven't noticed any significant difference between performance on dedicated and non-dedicated instances, and only use dedicated instances where required for compliance/regulatory reasons.

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

#45

Post by FTA »

desdiv wrote: post #30

(Bandwidth is ambiguous in this context so I'll use "data transfers" instead) I personally don't see the outrage. AmaGoogSoft overcharges for data transfers because they know they can get away with it and that lowering it won't attract more customers. Customers with transfer-heavy applications will always buy their servers from providers with unlimited transfers like OVH[0][1], where you can do hundreds of terabytes…

> I personally don't see the outrage. AmaGoogSoft overcharges for data transfers because they know they can get away with it and that lowering it won't attract more customers.

I know a handful of scientists, myself included, who would consider cloud computing were it not for the expensive egress costs. The ease of spinning up lots of computing power for scientific modelling is useless if retrieving the vast quantities of raw output data is costly. I will have to investigate OVH though as a potential opportunity--thanks.

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

#47

Post by InclinedPlane »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #7

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…

It's not the hardware you're paying for, it's the services. How much does it cost to employ a systems administrator? A lab tech? And so on. You see exactly the same pattern in software services. People pay more to buy products that are "turn key" versus having to hire someone to do tons of work building out systems or services or what-have-you.

Also, hiring people is a risk, and it doesn't happen instantly. When you have a gap of months without a sysadmin things are bad. Hiring a bad sysadmin is even worse. Not to mention the impossibility of hiring 1/2 or 3/4 of a sysadmin. There's scaling limits there. If you have the resources to DIY, that can be a key competitive advantage, but not everyone does.

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

#48

Post by gfody »

Johnny555 wrote: post #31
gfody wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you're right, the performance of the local storage on i3 instances is a lot better than normal EBS but still nothing close to what you would get from just buying an Intel P4500 or similar though.

http://www.aerospike.com/benchmarks/amazon-ec2-i3-performanc...

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

#49

Post by Klathmon »

orik wrote: post #32
mbesto wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Where can I find competent sysadmins capable of managing a system like that on their own for $40,000 a year?

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

#50

Post by chrischen »

mbesto wrote: post #19
shiftpgdn wrote: post #7

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?

Can probably hire a someone at minimum wage to watch it 24/7 in case it spontaneously combusts.
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