As the author of this post I need to clarify something. I love Amazon AWS, and I love the flexibility and awesomeness of cloud computing. I just don't like the bandwidth pricing ;) Sorry for the interruption, feel free to continue crucifying me. P.S. If someone has more accurate data I'd be happy to update the post or add a guest post. Cheers, Love Arador xoxox
Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing
151–160 of 233 posts
Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing
#152As a provider of IaaS Cloud and of dedicated servers and colo, I hear this argument all the time. No one ever seems to include the Network Engineers, monitoring systems, the routers (better have more than 1!), the switches (distribution and access layers), the maintenance, software licenses (where applicable), customer support, cost of IP addresses, Account Payable, ARIN membership, RADB membership, cross-connects, optics, spares and/or support contracts, etc... and finally, you do not use a 1Mbps at 100% for 24hrs per day, so while 1Mbps for a month is ~320GB, in reality, the way most people transfer data, 320GB would look more like 3Mbps at 95th percentile (the way burstable bandwidth is billed)
A basic 1Gbps commit on a 10Gbps port in a data center might cost you from $0.50/Mbps (something like Cogent) to maybe $1.50/Mbps (let's say Level 3), other providers could be $4+/Mbps. By the time you factor in all of the above overhead costs, the true cost of the bandwidth is much much higher on a per Mbps basis.
Don't forget to significantly over-build your stuff, or you might get knocked off-line for anomalies or DoS attacks.
Admittedly, the scale of Google, AWS, Azure makes the cost per Mbps much much lower, but when as others have pointed out, AWS, Google, Azure don't need to charge less than they do.
Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing
#153Meh. 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…
>There's a site on Neocities we host for free that would cost $560/mo to host on Amazon's CDN.
Neocities isn't just for static websites? How much traffic are getting that it would $560 on s3?
Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing
#154Meh. 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…
I bet that site loses money for Neocities every month. But it's subsidized by the tens of thousands of $5 sites that don't consume their allotment of resources.
Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing
#155Router? 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.
Most enterprises, you're right. I left people off because you can handle a dozen or more DCs with only a couple engineers if you assume (design for) frequent component failure and only do a site visit/decomm/install once or twice a year.
Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Bandwidth is generally a necessity for cloud hosting, unlike drinks with your tacos.
Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Alright, so $560 for a soda instead of a $5 soda.
> P.S. You could host it on Github for even less.
I'm not going to attempt to save an inconsequential amount of money by hosting a site I'm hosting on another host.
But that strategy probably wouldn't end well. The $560 site uses 25x more bandwidth than Github's fairly low soft limit of 100GB (https://help.github.com/articles/what-is-github-pages/) and is likely above the 1GB site limit (which is also just the sum of any changes ever, because git) of a Github pages site.
From seeing who their CDN provider is (one that charges basically the same CDN rates as AWS), my guess is that Github is paying a lot more for CDN transit than I am. It's perhaps not a coincidence that the 100GB BW limit was quietly introduced after they started using the CDN.
Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing
#158I 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…
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…
A corollary to #1, oops, mistakes were made, these server specs are wrong, I actually need more/less CPU/RAM/storage.
Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Bandwidth is generally a necessity for cloud hosting, unlike drinks with your tacos.
Lots of bandwidth is generally only necessary for CDN. And that could be anyone.
Re: Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing
#160Fundamental methodological error: It compares provisioned capacity (colo & Google Fiber) to utilization.
In order for this comparison to be valid you'd need to get 100% utilization of your colo or Google Fiber pipe. You only pay for what you use with AWS et al. And quite obviously the pricing of GF and Amazon Lightsail assumes less than 100%. Nobody's getting "screwed".