Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing

arador.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 233 posts

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

#141

Post by jcastro »

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…

I think you're being a bit rose-colored glasses here if you're implying that apache/cgi sites had some sort of incredible uptime record back in the time when "the slashdot effect" was still a thing.

> Most of my bare metal and colocated machines have uptime of many years.

Nobody cares about host uptime, that just means you're not applying security updates. You're lamenting that you have to worry about fault tolerance in the cloud when the entire point is to have throw away instances!

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

#142

Post by api »

TheDrizzle43 wrote: post #133
api wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Montreal has low pings to the US.

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

#143

Post by paulddraper »

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…

It's the drinks that are expensive, not the tacos.

And soda has a 1,150% markup [1], so it actually is like that.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/products-high-markups-2014-7

P.S. You could host it on Github for even less, if you were really price conscious.

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

#144

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

You're comparing the simplist possible scenario with a platform that can replace a large data center.

How do you handle segmentation of workload among thousands of servers? Provide firewall services? Meter bandwidth? Provide redundancy to protect against failure of a switch or any other single network component? Provide redundant transit via multiple ISPs?

The answer historically is that you would buy a bunch of stuff from Cisco, pay through the nose for TAC, and hire a team of network engineers who may or may not be idiots. One place I worked at lived with a 30 day eta in firewall changes.

Your server that has a long uptime is a risk in a large org. It's obviously not patched, nobody knows how to configure it again. Different customers have different needs.

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

#145

Post by morecoffee »

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…

...and how many people need that? I would gladly 1/3 of the cost for 4 nines over 5 nines. (or whatever SLA they offer).

Not everyone need a ritzy ultra reliable network. It costs way too much and hardly any customer is going to get comparable value out of it.

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

#146

Post by Spooky23 »

_jal wrote: post #103
MBCook wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#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.

...That sounds more like an HR problem than a technical problem. There are network engineers in the world who don't live in caves and gnaw at the bones of administrative assistants.

There are, but they are hard to find.

Networking is a great place for assholes to build empires and exert control. In 20 years of professional engagement with distributed and data center networks, most of these guys (and they are almost always guys) running network orgs are an impediment and spend more time helping out their vendor of choice than anything else.

I've run into awesome network guys in position of power only a few times, and they are 100x employees. The last major rollout of a service that I did was literally 3 months ahead of schedule solely because of the efforts of this awesome network dude snowman as recently put in charge.

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

#147

Post by eropple »

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…

I used to use OVH on occasion, but I was really disappointed with their North American-based tech support. Didn't seem particularly plugged-in and English proficiency was shaky. (At this point I'm in AWS because I don't really care about low-point performance and would rather spike up when needed.)

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

#148

Post by enos_feedler »

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…

Perhaps an even better analogy is popcorn and soda at the movie theater. Its 10x the price of buying it at costco (perhaps 100x), but you are paying for the movie. In the world of cloud computing this is things like TPUs. I think the lesson here is if you are merely looking for connected bandwidth, maybe cloud providers aren't for you. Shop elsewhere. The point of cloud computing is clearly moving in the direction of data-driven services, at large scale, for big businesses.

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

#149

Post by clhodapp »

I've always figured that the point of this was to allow a) overall costs to generally scale with the "size" of the customer while simultaneously creating a sticker shock effect on migrating out of whatever cloud. For example, looking at Google, the cost to transfer a terabyte out of their Cloud Storage product is six times the cost of just keeping it there for month. Of course some of this collapses if you really look into it (e.g. you are going to pay that egress anyway if people are actually accessing the data) but I'm not sure that that is always clear to execs doing back of envelope math. I think that to some degree this desire for lock-in is explicitly visible in the asymmetric ingress/egress pricing but I do think that it's a little bit underhanded if I am right because it would mean that slightly-deflated e.g. instance prices would be subsidized by lockin.

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

#150

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

I just landed a few racks of bladecenters and storage. High 7 figure deal. This was probably the best implementation project ever... everything ran on time, the vendor delivered everything on time, facilities was 100% ready and pre-cabled, etc. I'm incredibly proud of our team -- our biggest issue was someone ordered the wrong SFP. Butter.

Timeline: 120 days procurement (including product evaluation and PoC), 30 days install activity, 10 days buildout. 10 days software build, 15 days testing.

That's a little over 6 months. A ton of vendor/build engineering/tester time. And we'll be at 50% capacity for another 4 months. Or... we could spin the whole thing up on AWS/GCE/Azure in < 30 days and only consume what we need when we need it.

Post reply on HN