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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

#71

Post by MBCook »

didip wrote: post #41
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…

#3 is why we went to Amazon, and its one of the reasons we were successful. Sad as that was. No weeks/months of delays/hassles/fights/sabotage. Just success as fast as we could do our part and figure out the few small hurdles.

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

#72

Post by sjg007 »

FTA wrote: post #45
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 quantitie…

If you're an academic you could probably negotiate with google/msft/aws for a discounted if not free egress rate.

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

#73

Post by throw2016 »

mankash666 wrote: post #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 includ…

This comes off as a bit of a red herring. No one is denying the value of their other offerings. It's the cost of bandwidth which is clearly disproportionate.

Let them charge for extra for the 'value adds', what is the justification for adding these costs to the bandwidth specifically?

I think people raising the issue are just seeking more transparent pricing.

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

#74

Post by kmicklas »

mankash666 wrote: post #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 includ…

This is definitely true but I think that possibly as the big cloud players devote more and more of their revenue towards developing all kinds of (vendor lockin) APIs each of which does not concern the average user, rather than generic and reliable infrastructure that benefits all users, the value proposition will get worse and worse.

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

#75

Post by Klathmon »

baudehlo wrote: post #60
Klathmon wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can buy sysadmin services. This isn't a full time job at that level.

Then you are just trading one fee for another, but the "sysadmin services" you are ordering most likely has slower response time, less resources, less knowledge, and worse uptime guarantees than someone like aws.

Yeah, at the larger sizes it might make sense, but not for everyone.

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

#76

Post by vacri »

user5994461 wrote: post #52
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…

Use google cloud or softlayer and the same machine is $1500 a month. It's no secret that AWS is a rip off on instance pricing. Use the competitors if you worry so much about pricing.

How does that work out? Looking at the per-hour figures in AWS and GCE, they're similar for a 64-core, quarter terabyte RAM machine ($3.20 AWS, $3.40 GCE). Both vendors have ways to get your bill discounted (with google's being easier). AWS's instance pricing has been fairly comparable to other vendors for a couple of years now; it's their bandwidth that's costly.

What are most people running anyway? Using this kind of behemoth server as a 'typical' example seems out of line.

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

#78

Post by bitmapbrother »

dna_polymerase wrote: post #20
cobookman wrote: post #2

I dont think its fair to compare GCP's egress costs to a colo's. A collocation is simply sending your packets straight to the internet, where-as GCP routes your packets over private fiber to its closet POP to your user. Giving you better latency.

You are right, the Google Network magic is awesome. Yet I agree with the opinion here. They charge more than they should. Yet I think in the long run it will become cheaper (AWS is always pushing for price reduction and the others will follow)

Isn't GCP the one that pushes for price reductions and then the rest will follow?

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

#79

Post by jrochkind1 »

FTA wrote: post #45
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 quantitie…

The cloud pricing model has, I would say, definitely been set for ecommerce uses, not scientific computing. Ecommerce uses use a lot less data, and if they are using a huge amount of data they are likely to have a corresponding amount of revenue to pay the high prices.

Scientific computing -- you've probably got a ton of data, and your 'revenue' from project-based grants doesn't really scale with the amount of data and other computing resource needs you have, at least not to the extent it does for ecommerce.

Possibly AWS could make money on scientific data at prices you could afford... but they probably make the _most_ money by targeting their pricing model at ecommerce, which has the most money to spend.

Possibly there's a business model for a cloud-provider focusing on scientific computing. I mean, there probably are such providers already I don't know about? Maybe? But it'd be a tough business, the people paying are pretty budgetarily constrained, their budgets don't neccesarily go proportionaly as their resource needs go up, they traditionally are (ironically) averse to innovation in IT, there might not be enough likely customers to give the provider the scale they need to make money, etc.

Capitalism!

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

#80

Post by WalterSear »

mankash666 wrote: post #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 includ…

Considering my experience with google adwords service, I wouldn't be surprised if the teams providing these services were under heavy pressure to over-promise, under-deliver, and sneak in as many hidden charges as they possibly can.
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