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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

#121

Post by vacri »

user5994461 wrote: post #102
vacri wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google n1-standard-64 => $1710 AWS m4.16xlarge => $2592 Google base is slightly lower and it gives you 30% off automatically on instances that run 24/7 for the month. That's typical of on premise deployments. You get big servers because they are so annoying to deploy you might as well fill everything possible in the box. On the clouds, you would create a group of VM per service, with appropriate size for the service.…

Isn't that $1710 already including the 30% discount? (It works out to $3.4 x 30ish days x 70%). You get similar discounts on AWS, but you have to commit for a year - given the OP's intent of leasing a Dell server for three years, this shouldn't be dismissed.

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

#122

Post by FTA »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #93
FTA wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I can think of a few off the cuff.

You're likely not running a model just for yourself. You have collaborators at other institutions that need data to compare or combine with something else.

Your grant may require you distribute the output for use by other researchers. That could either entail being hosted by you or by an agency or other entity. But you still have to get the data to them.

A reviewer for your publications may request the data.

That brings up another point that the review process can be upwards of a year.

Oftentimes you have to go through an exploratory data analysis, where you don't even know what your final analysis will entail.

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

#123

Post by dmourati »

Lazare wrote: post #106

Meh. The big cloud platforms offer a rich selection of different offerings, which (just like in every other industry) cross subsidize each other. When I go to a restaurant, I don't expect that they will be making the same profit margin on every item on the final bill, and in fact, they almost never do. Drinks tend to have a very high profit margin, some labour intensive items may be a break even at best, and the comp…

This is a nice way to look at the pricing model in the context of something we can all understand: Mexican food.

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

#124

Post by FTA »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #79
FTA wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Yeah I suppose my argument is a bit moot given Amazon probably makes plenty of money in the private sector without having to worry about academia. But if they could get the cost down to be on the level of buying and running your own hardware, they could see an emergent market.

In fact, the federal government in its current business-oriented mindset may even lean towards a contractor handled machine to replace ones like Yellowstone at NCAR or those at NOAA NCEP if the price was right.

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

#125

Post by amygdyl »

_jal wrote: post #99
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…

> 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 o…

If every cloud service arguably overprices one essential part of delivery, bandwidth usage in this case, my instinct (no more, no less and no pretension to analysis) is that there's a design intent to ensure a difficult to price component of the service provision is paid for.

I'm merely speculating, but if you have a idea what is the possible difficult to price component, can anyone help with any suggestions?

Edit to suggest a similitude: my job is to help people understand the price of (print) advertising. This is often intractable. To a certain extent, a good deal of people involved just throw costs into commission rates and other factors that make understanding the price models difficult and sometimes completely opaque. Is it impossible to imagine that the cost of cloud bandwidth is nothing less innocent than "put our non itemized expenses here'?

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

#127

Post by [deleted] »

mankash666 wrote: post #85
MichaelGG wrote: post #67

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).

[deleted]

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

#128

Post by bkruse »

I mentioned this in the price reductions of S3 announcement

People fail to realize the true cost of operating on S3, specifically when hundreds of TB of usable data is in play

"By putting the "tax" on bandwidth, a lot of these business cases are solved. I see why Amazon does that. AWS is great, but as you get into high scale (specifically in storage - 2PB+), it becomes extremely cost prohibitive."

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

#129

Post by [deleted] »

dmourati wrote: post #123
Lazare wrote: post #106

Meh. The big cloud platforms offer a rich selection of different offerings, which (just like in every other industry) cross subsidize each other. When I go to a restaurant, I don't expect that they will be making the same profit margin on every item on the final bill, and in fact, they almost never do. Drinks tend to have a very high profit margin, some labour intensive items may be a break even at best, and the comp…

This is a nice way to look at the pricing model in the context of something we can all understand: Mexican food.

[deleted]

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

#130

Post by [deleted] »

abalone wrote: post #105
sokoloff wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Netfl…

Speaking of Netflix: “The best way to express it is that everything you see on Netflix up until the play button is on AWS, the actual video is delivered through our CDN,” Netflix spokesperson Joris Evers said.[1] [1] http://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/cloud-computing/...

[deleted]
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