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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

#111

Post by mbesto »

slackingoff2017 wrote: post #92
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…

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 t…

> Before all these cloud providers websites were not noticeably less reliable than they are now.

Before all of these providers existed:

1) The volume of internet traffic that exists today didn't exist then. Mobile devices didn't exist. Mobile devices that aren't always connected to the internet and consume hours of our day didn't exist. Large downloads (1GB) didn't exist. They couldn't exist because the infrastructure that exists now can properly support it...at scale.

2) Websites that had large volumes of traffic had top tier expensive admins to maintain them (surprise surprise, Amazon did and turned it into a service)

> Most of my bare metal and colocated machines have uptime of many years. Most AWS VM's die after a year or two.

3) What's your definition of "most"? Sources for those numbers please?

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

#112

Post by elevensies »

lumost wrote: post #83
elevensies wrote: post #53

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.

I guess what I'd like to know is: at what point is it worth seriously evaluating alternatives to just using cloud services and paying the sticker price -- which means evaluating the labor cost as well as the cost of the service, where this submission and many others I've seen will quantify the cost of the services and say that bare metal is so much cheaper while ignoring the cost of managing it.

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

#113

Post by samstave »

mbesto wrote: post #111
slackingoff2017 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Before all these cloud providers websites were not noticeably less reliable than they are now. Before all of these providers existed: 1) The volume of internet traffic that exists today didn't exist then. Mobile devices didn't exist. Mobile devices that aren't always connected to the internet and consume hours of our day didn't exist. Large downloads (1GB) didn't exist. They couldn't exist because the infrastructur…

Yeah, well my BBS runs just fine over 2400 baud and 640kb ram. Ill see your ass in the Pit.

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

#114

Post by noahl »

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 true, but I think there's another point that's even more significant: not all network access is the same. In particular, putting some machines in a rack in a colo and connecting to the nearest Internet exchange is really not comparable to Google's networking, which is essentially a worldwide second Internet that is faster and more reliable than the normal Internet, and which carries your packets as far as possible towards their destination before dropping them off at a POP.

(Note: I worked for Google until 3 days ago.)

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

#115

Post by hinkley »

dfinninger wrote: post #62
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?

Doesn't make much sense for one server... but if you have 5, then you are looking at $200k. Then as you go up the numbers start making more sense.

That might get you one admin (we office workers have a mistaken belief that our salary is most of our cost. It's somewhere just north of half.).

What do you do when they're on vacation/sick/sleeping?

Thing is, I really want us to host our own stuff. For one thing if you don't host anything you lose all competence and then you really are beholden to your cloud provider.

But it seems to be that we are in this situation until someone figures out how to comodify servers - and server orchestration - to the point where this stuff gets cheaper to manage again.

This pendulum always swings. No sooner will we control our own hardware again than someone will come up with a new way to centralize it.

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

#116

Post by jason_pomerleau »

baudehlo wrote: post #96
Klathmon wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Outsourced ops know your systems.

I worked for a MSP for many years, and was well acquainted with our regional competitors. Our uptime and theirs was nowhere near AWS-level.

You're getting a different engineer every time you pick up the phone. They most certainly do not know your systems like an internal team would. I regularly saw cascading/circular issues caused by lack of familiarity and/or poor change management.

Owning and administering your own iron makes sense at a certain scale, but it's a much bigger scale than most companies will reach.

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

#117

Post by carterehsmith »

slackingoff2017 wrote: post #11

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.

> it's orders of magnitude cheaper to colocate as long as you can afford an IT guy and the upfront cost of hardware.

It may be. But for many people, it does not matter.

Let's say you work at the place (I do) where "compute" cost is like ~0.5% of the total costs. Almost all of the cost is employee's salaries and benefits.

BTW we get (and from what I hear, everyone does) offers from other cloud vendors to switch, and get 1 year free or whatever. And it gets ignored because it is a big risk for a tiny possible gain.

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

#118

Post by cobookman »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #4
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.

Do you have more details about this? I am 100% certain this isn't the case in Azure.

It's not the case with azure or aws. Only true with GCP and GCPs global load balancer / software defined networking.

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

#119

Post by jfoutz »

dfinninger wrote: post #62
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?

Doesn't make much sense for one server... but if you have 5, then you are looking at $200k. Then as you go up the numbers start making more sense.

Totally, the thing that's super cool about the amazon instances you don't have to do anything with users, authentication, authorization, networking, dns, backups, monitoring, logging, firewall rules, security patches and upgrades.

With a bare metal server you have to manage all of that.

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

#120

Post by eip »

philipov wrote: post #40
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…

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

Does it also replace 'millennials' with 'snake people'?
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