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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

#131

Post by Xorlev »

noahl wrote: post #114
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 pos…

Can't agree more. I balked at the cost (still sort of do as a GCP user) until I joined Google and was able to peek behind the curtain. The network quality is absurd. GCP customers pay a premium for having the same network reach as Google. Their network works extremely hard to get user traffic onto the internal network as early as possible.

Not only that, but Google's datacenters have 24/7 attention, lots of redundant providers, etc.. A bargain basement colo won't be nearly as reliable.

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

#132

Post by mmalone »

sargun wrote: post #38
mmalone wrote: post #12

Keep in mind that with cloud providers you're also paying for the SDN that makes dynamic provisioning of VMs and logical network segmentation possible. Scalable SDN is much harder / more expensive than traditional networking.

According to whom?

According to me... Are you arguing that it's not? It stands to reason that dynamic network architectures (SDNs) would be harder and more expensive to design and build than static architectures... it's the difference between managing shared mutable state and managing shared immutable state. On the hardware side, a simple commodity hub or switch is cheaper than a CPU, an FPGA, or burning your own ASIC to do fast SDN.

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

#133

Post by TheDrizzle43 »

api wrote: post #10
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…

OVH has absurdly low prices on both. If you have a baseline load take a look. Their enterprise offerings are pretty rock solid and they have multiple data centers with direct fiber backplane interconnects. IMHO the big cloud providers only make sense if you have a highly elastic load or if you are making extensive use of their as-a-service higher level offerings. If you're running baseline load bare metal destroys th…

Unfortunately OVH doesn't have any data centers in the US although they seem to be working on them.

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

#134

Post by lumost »

elevensies wrote: post #112
lumost wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The general break even point is circa 200k USD per month, assuming the company has spare capital, and the ability to commit to using the same gear for 3 years.

It's useful to keep in mind that in this type of scenario the goal is not to replace a cloud provider but to leverage capital to get better bang for the buck on select services. ex. using in-house compute farms and leveraging s3 for storage

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

#136

Post by rdtsc »

MBCook wrote: post #71
didip wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is sabotage something you are worried about in general. Just seems like there might be deeper and serious issues if that is a primary​ concern.

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

#138

Post by kyledrake »

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…

There's a site on Neocities we host for free that would cost $560/mo to host on Amazon's CDN.

It costs me less than $5 with my current configuration (which is also a global CDN). It's way over our "soft limit", but it's an awesome site so I don't care. The important part is, I don't have to care.

This isn't about slightly more expensive tacos. It's about spending $560 on tacos instead of $5. "Meh" wouldn't exactly be my first reaction to getting that bill at the taco cart (or the fanciest taco place in the world, for that matter).

I can get IP transit in datacenters from $240-$600/Gb right now. So even his $960 transit cost for datacenters is off by quite a bit. He's comparing with a pretty high price and it still looks ridiculous.

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

#139

Post by noahl »

Xorlev wrote: post #131
noahl wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pos…

Can't agree more. I balked at the cost (still sort of do as a GCP user) until I joined Google and was able to peek behind the curtain. The network quality is absurd. GCP customers pay a premium for having the same network reach as Google. Their network works extremely hard to get user traffic onto the internal network as early as possible. Not only that, but Google's datacenters have 24/7 attention, lots of redundant…

Yes, you're right, and you mentioned something else that I forgot to. A lot of people here are comparing Big 3 network costs to the cost of hiring a single network administrator. The correct comparison is to the cost of hiring a team big enough to staff a 24-hour on call rotation with a 5 minute response time SLA.

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

#140

Post by [deleted] »

kyledrake wrote: post #138
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…

There's a site on Neocities we host for free that would cost $560/mo to host on Amazon's CDN. It costs me less than $5 with my current configuration (which is also a global CDN). It's way over our "soft limit", but it's an awesome site so I don't care. The important part is, I don't have to care. This isn't about slightly more expensive tacos. It's about spending $560 on tacos instead of $5. "Meh" wouldn't exactly be…

[deleted]
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