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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

#91

"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?

About 2-3x. I'm a big fan of cloud computing in general (and AWS in particular as the clear leader, IMO) and helped lead our transition out of colos and into AWS, but the egress charges is the biggest area of AWS that I feel is egregiously over-priced.

Fortunately, it's relatively easy to locate some of your very high egress services outside of AWS. I discourage that for casual optimization, but when you get to Netflix/20 scale, that makes sense to trifle with.

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

#92

"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…

I disagree strongly with this. Before all these cloud providers websites were not noticeably less reliable than they are now. I was around back when Apache and CGI was all there was, even then uptime was so good that it was rare to hit a website that was down.

There's a lot of koolaid being thrown around by the companies with cloud to sell. Unfortunately these also happen to be the big "market leaders" so it's hard to deny what they're saying and get taken seriously.

It's like six sigma, agile, or stack ranking. The big guys are doing it so it must be the right thing to do... Right? Until everyone realized it's mostly a ploy to make money selling books and conference tickets, or in this case rent out a bunch of excess capacity for huge profit.

I disagree with reliability as well. Most of my bare metal and colocated machines have uptime of many years. Most AWS VM's die after a year or two. With the cloud you have to worry a lot more about fault tolerance whereas with dedicated equipment simple offline backups are often enough to meet any reasonable SLA.

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

#93
post #45
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…

May I ask why you want to retrieve it? Wouldn't you just leave it there, and download only the conclusions?

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

#94
post #25

Since Lightsail is mentioned, it's probably worth including Digital Ocean since they offer almost identical network transfer for the money [1]. [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/

It's also worth noting that Digital Ocean gives you half the amount of RAM that Linode[0] and Vultr[1] offer for the same price point.

  [0] https://www.linode.com/pricing
  [1] https://www.vultr.com/pricing/

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

#95

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…

Also, employees? These are services that are actively maintained and developed."Alternative 1 – Colocation in a Data Center" doesn't include the 100k/yr you'll have to pay an engineer to manage that hardware.

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

#96

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.

Well you're not comparing to AWS without ops, you're comparing to hiring someone for non-AWS vs managing AWS on your own. Outsourced ops know your systems. They have contracted guarantees. They can manage your own systems, hosted systems or even AWS. Using not-AWS saves you enough to pay for that.

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

#97

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.

Nope you have a number for the person that provides the service and you can call her/him. Unless you are at several million per month spend at AWS have fun getting a hold of someone when sh#t hits the fan.

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

#98

"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?

would a scale streaming customer really pay that much?

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

#99

"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…

> Disagree. There's no false advertising here

I don't see any claims about false advertising. Just complaints about one aspect of the service being very overpriced. Sounds like you consider it worth it for your application, and that's great. But it is simply not priced appropriately for a lot of services, which naturally go elsewhere.

It seems obvious to me that bandwidth is Azon's proxy measure for "utility". Lots of companies do this - Oracle uses core-count as a proxy for the "utility" you get from their software, for example. But like any proxy for a different variable, it is going to be wrong; sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.

And you hardly need to be a "BIG" company to choose something other than cloud hosting. My last two looked at and rejected them. Neither qualify as even medium-sized. Both are extremely cost-aware. Running our own data centers is cost-competitive at my current gig and was much, much cheaper at the last, which was very bandwidth-heavy.

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

#100

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…

When we account for cost of,

1) remote hands

2) network switches

3) hardware components you'll need for redundancy, I've personally replaced network cards because fans burned out or HDDs because of usual failure rate.

4) when I'm done using a n1-highcpu-32 I stop using it and not pay for it, or when I need 5 of those for 2 hours I provision them and stop when I'm done running a workload.

5) upgrades to hardware or additional hardware, intel released skylake, should I buy those and try to sell my Haswell on eBay?

I'm not sure it becomes a simple price of server + colo cost comparison.

With GCP (I use daily), AWS (I used to use) or Azure, what I'm paying for is someone else to focus on things like colo leases, capacity expansion, redundancy, physical security and provide higher order services - load balancers, BigTable/BigQuery, CloudSQL/RDS, GKE, DataProc.

This allows me to run all of infra as close to capacity as possible while avoiding any wasted cycles

However I do miss going to data centers and hear my machines hum and blink, that is quite the feeling.

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