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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

#82

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…

Often, you still need a "systems administrator" with the cloud. Except, now he calls himself a DevOps guy and charges a lot more. ;) AWS isn't going to configure itself.

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

#83

Back of the envelope calculation: - assume $100/TB for cloud data transfer - assume one employee full time equivalent to manage colo'd servers ($10,000/mo), plus $30/TB data transfer The break even point for the colo'd setup from a networking perspective is: 10,000 + 30X = 100X X = 10,000/70 = 142 (TB/month) At 1MB per "request" I believe this works out to about 50 requests per second average to reach this traffic le…

This calculation is an all or nothing affair though. The reality is that you can avoid most AWS bandwidth charges by direct connecting to an internet exchange. It's still only worth the effort if you're looking at a 6 figure bandwidth bill, but it doesn't require new employees.

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

#84

Back of the envelope calculation: - assume $100/TB for cloud data transfer - assume one employee full time equivalent to manage colo'd servers ($10,000/mo), plus $30/TB data transfer The break even point for the colo'd setup from a networking perspective is: 10,000 + 30X = 100X X = 10,000/70 = 142 (TB/month) At 1MB per "request" I believe this works out to about 50 requests per second average to reach this traffic le…

50 rps is a very modest box you obviously will want at least 2 but at any rate the difference between that and AWS is not a full time employee it's more like 10h per month. Why would colo data transfer cost $30/TB :)?

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

#85

"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 simply untrue for bandwidth charges if you're pushing a lot of data. A streaming video service, for example, might end up paying $0.10/user/hour. So a movie-a-night customer would cost $6. What multiple of reasonable do you think that is?

A good case study is Dropbox. They didn't build any of their own infrastructure until they became big enough (2 years ago).

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

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is simply untrue for bandwidth charges if you're pushing a lot of data. A streaming video service, for example, might end up paying $0.10/user/hour. So a movie-a-night customer would cost $6. What multiple of reasonable do you think that is?

A good case study is Dropbox. They didn't build any of their own infrastructure until they became big enough (2 years ago).

Dropbox built their own infrastructure over five years ago. They just took several years to turn the infra from idle to being used.

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

#87

Router? Gateway? Firewall? Network Access Control? VLANs? Ability to manage all this through declarative version controlled code w/ rollback? The costs of doing those (well) yourself are not cheap. Getting them from a provider that's certified to do them well while giving you software control also isn't cheap. You're comparing cost of gas per gallon to to expense of miles driven per gallon. Pretty sure on your IRS or…

Exactly. Olive Garden is $10 for a pasta plate. I could have bought the ingredients for less than $2.

It takes times and skill to turn the ingredients into something useful.

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are IaaS/PaaS, not ISPs.

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

#88

Router? Gateway? Firewall? Network Access Control? VLANs? Ability to manage all this through declarative version controlled code w/ rollback? The costs of doing those (well) yourself are not cheap. Getting them from a provider that's certified to do them well while giving you software control also isn't cheap. You're comparing cost of gas per gallon to to expense of miles driven per gallon. Pretty sure on your IRS or…

Heck, even the cost of creating and maintaining documentation for the services has to be enormous. The first time I worked with the AWS IoT services I was extremely impressed by the breadth, depth, and quality of the documentation, and it all seemed up-to-date: the screenshots showed the same interfaces I was seeing, and even documentation on small features or use-cases seemed to be accurate and current.

When you put it all together, you're not paying for bandwidth, you're paying for the power and convenience of a robust, high-quality, high-availability solution that provides extraordinary benefits when looked at holistically.

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

#89
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That means you only have about $40k/yr to hire a sysadmin assuming they need no supplies or tools...

$40k/yr/server

With correct pricing (3-year commitment), you're actually looking at about $8k/yr/server difference, for 64-core servers. If you're at the point where your workload requires ~12 64-core servers, that difference will net you $100k, which you can spend on the ops staffer.

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

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At smaller sizes too. If you just have one server, it's unlikely that the slower response time will loose you 3000 dollars per month which is the savings of dedicated service versus aws. Many small businesses run on leased hardware with on site support. Rackspace for instance made their fortune in that sector.
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