Live data from Hacker News

Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing

arador.com

171–180 of 233 posts

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

#171
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Read again: it's free for the user, $5 is the cost to neocities (so yes, it looses them money. $5 a month)

Whoops. You are correct.

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

#172

Earlier 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.

I realize this is far away from the point, but that infographic starts off stupid. Painting has a 6,000% markup? That could only possibly be true if you don't count the painter's time. Just because it's all labor doesn't mean it's high markup; the painter isn't selling you the paint he's selling you the service.

And mixed drinks are more like a 4x markup. Lower at the high end even. Not sure where they pulled that number from. If it's anything like the coffee total, they'er comparing the garbage ingredients people typically use at home against the highest quality ingredients in the best places.

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

#173
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…

...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.

I agree! This is a real issue for cloud providers currently. You shouldn't have to pay for the super-reliable fast network if you don't want it.

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

#174
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…

Agreed... this article makes a useless one-dimensional comparison of several different services based on their pricing for a single aspect of each of those services. I'm not saying there aren't price discrepancies, or opportunities for more competition that might benefit consumers and enterprises... but the comparisons as portrayed in this article are just not useful except to show how pointless such one-dimensional comparisons are.

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

#175

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…

Use google cloud or softlayer and the same machine is $1500 a month. It's no secret that AWS is a rip off on instance pricing. Use the competitors if you worry so much about pricing.

[deleted]

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

#176
FWIW cost for a small biz at most major metro US facilities is closer to $1/mbit for a multi-carrier (which means generally multi-route and high quality with some caveats), and $0.20 if you do something like he.net. For higher volume customers you can easily cut both of those rates in half right now. And you can also participate on public peering switches for generally just a low setup fee at the best facilities.

AWS, GCE, azure seem like the platforms of yesteryear in all dimensions when compared to something like packet.net. I think these providers could be in a rock and a hard place due to the unsuitability of native Linux containers for secure multi-tenancy. This does leave a nice runway for Joyent as both a provider and software vendor for at least a little bit, but I think packet.net is really going to change the economy of infra.

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

#177
post #131
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…

>Their network works extremely hard to get user traffic onto the internal network as early as possible.

The benefit of this has can't be understated. In SE Asia connecting to their Taiwan region from most places I'm literally just at the mercy of a few local hops at level 3 due to their extensive remote peering. Staying on the Google network is also interesting to observe when connecting between Google Compute data centers.

AWS and Azure behave considerably different.

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

#178

Worth noting that Digital Ocean doesn't actually bill for bandwidth. They say they do in their Droplet template descriptions, but they really don't. I've pushed many many terabytes to/from my Droplets and never received a bill for it. But you need to cap your individual Droplet bandwidth using something like tc[0] around ~400MB/s or they'll shut off the network interface (DDoS detection). [0] http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Tr…

indeed. I'm surprised how buried this comment is, because it's a really good deal (until they change things). anecdotally, DO sent me an email when one of my droplets was sustaining around 200MB/s, but it wasn't a "knock it off" email, it was an "is this intentional" email. is the ~400MB/s figure from your own experience?

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

#179
post #152

As 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, o…

Yup. I took a swag at a generalized breakdown of "data transfer" costs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7479030 four years ago. The values might be slightly different today, the logic isnt.

I suppose part of the issue is marketing. The customer reads the bill as "bandwidth." Would consumers understand better if there was a separate "network infrastructure" line item? Would they accept differntial pricing for network quality or class? Dont see why we'd find out as long as theres no downward pricing pressure.

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

#180

Router? 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…

Exactly. Olive Garden is $10 for a pasta plate. I could have bought the ingredients for less than $2. It takes times and skill to turn the ingredients into something useful. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are IaaS/PaaS, not ISPs.

Want to disrupt the restaurant industry?

Sell food at cost!

/s

Post reply on HN