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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

#211

Post by mmaunder »

mikiem wrote: 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…

This is bull. I've used colo and been paying 95th percentile billing for a decade. We've run our own hardware. Much of your list didn't even come in to it. E.g. you don't need your own router, you get awesome ddos mitigation from upstream providers like NTT super cheap. It's been a major competitive advantage to get bandwidth this way.

Cost of IPs? Memberships? Wtf are you talking about? Cross connects? This stuff is all free, not needed or cheap and a one time fee.

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

#212

Post by mad182 »

deafcalculus wrote: post #200

I suspect the high bandwidth price is a targeting tool and is primarily for repelling those wanting to host seed boxes, porn sites and the like. You can probably get a much better deal if you're paying > 10k$/mo. Even then, cloud bandwidth is insanely expensive. For example, Hetzner offers 1.3$/TB (if you happen to exceed their generous 30 TB quota). In comparison, Amazon is 70x more expensive at 90$/TB.

Hetzner is great. I'm running a site with ~45TB monthly traffic on 3 physical servers and it costs me just over $150. I would have to pay many thousands to any cloud hosting provider and it wouldn't pay off in my case.

Sure, if high availability is critical for you business and money is not an issue, it may be worth it. YMMV.

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

#213

Post by king_phil »

mmaunder wrote: post #211
mikiem wrote: 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…

This is bull. I've used colo and been paying 95th percentile billing for a decade. We've run our own hardware. Much of your list didn't even come in to it. E.g. you don't need your own router, you get awesome ddos mitigation from upstream providers like NTT super cheap. It's been a major competitive advantage to get bandwidth this way. Cost of IPs? Memberships? Wtf are you talking about? Cross connects? This stuff is…

Really depends on your scale. If you just run half a rack of equipment a lot of these costs are factored in by your housing company. But you come to a certain point where you need to invest in a RIPE membership, where you need a router that costs 100k€. Plus a spare one. Where you need someone to watch the monitoring 24h sitting in the DC - just in case. Even if a lot of this stuff is free, it needs to be setup up and managed all the time.

Let alone the cost for DDoS mitigation. Thats an easy 300k€ worth of equipment plus lets say 2x40 GBit/s links for lets say 40k€ each per link and month. Over the course of two years thats easy 1 million euros, just to handle DDoS. Even if you just need 10 GBit/s capacity, you might need 10x that capacity in a DDoS situtation.

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

#214

Post by [deleted] »

slackingoff2017 wrote: post #15
cobookman wrote: post #2

I dont think its fair to compare GCP's egress costs to a colo's. A collocation is simply sending your packets straight to the internet, where-as GCP routes your packets over private fiber to its closet POP to your user. Giving you better latency.

This is only true with Google as far as I know. And I'm fairly sure that all cloud providers only have maybe 10 edge routers in the US so the utility is limited. You can't have too many edge routers because they rely on IP Anycast which is dangerous to do if your routes are too similar.

[deleted]

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

#215

Post by qaq »

late2part wrote: post #196
qaq wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope you have a number for the person that provides the service and you can call her/him. Unless you are at several million per month spend at AWS have fun getting a hold of someone when sh#t hits the fan.

Good luck hiring someone on a demand hourly basis that knows your stuff and won't break your stuff.

Hmm never had an issue, but to have people at AWS that know my stuff would start somewhere north of 100 million a year spend on AWS.

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

#216

Post by qaq »

elevensies wrote: post #104
qaq wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50 rps is a very modest box you obviously will want at least 2 but at any rate the difference between that and AWS is not a full time employee it's more like 10h per month. Why would colo data transfer cost $30/TB :)?

The $30 number comes from the original article -- If I were to make the colo data transfer free and change nothing else, break even point is 100TB/mo. For the employee cost I agree if you just have a couple boxes pumping out data your labor cost will be quite low. I'm imagining what else you might have happening on your back end using AWS services that you'd also have to replicate in your colocated installation to pr…

it's $20 at DigitalOcean which is already heavily marked up :) compared to colo. The sweet spot for AWS is low traffic project that uses a very large number of AWS services or something with extremely spiky workload. It's a legend that you don't need ops people for AWS. We have a fairly complicated large scale project on AWS we have 4 full time ops people. If we were in colo we would need 5-6 instead of 4 and a bit of remote hands services.

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

#217

Post by tbirdz »

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…

Hi Kyle. You've got me curious now, which Neocity site are you talking about, I would love to check it out.

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

#218

Post by MBCook »

rdtsc wrote: post #199
MBCook wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was sabotage in the 'oops this project isn't working' or 'oops this really import thing came up, no time' or 'didn't I do that?' sense. Having some plausible deniability. Work slowdown/stoppage stuff. Not actively breaking things (mostly). And it was all directed at maintaining control/power. Worst person I've ever worked with. When I tell stories at future jobs I fully expect people to not believe me. Hell, peopl…

Oh I believe you. I've heard of it before. Was trying to say that if that's an issue, it should be an HR fix more than an infrastructure fix. But I also imagine often that person also convinced management the are an "11x rockstar programmer"...

They were one of the hardest working people in the company. Partially that's because they worked on nonsense projects they made up, and partially that's because they were always putting out fires caused by the fact they did things poorly in the first place.

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

#219

Post by ethbro »

king_phil wrote: post #213
mmaunder wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bull. I've used colo and been paying 95th percentile billing for a decade. We've run our own hardware. Much of your list didn't even come in to it. E.g. you don't need your own router, you get awesome ddos mitigation from upstream providers like NTT super cheap. It's been a major competitive advantage to get bandwidth this way. Cost of IPs? Memberships? Wtf are you talking about? Cross connects? This stuff is…

Really depends on your scale. If you just run half a rack of equipment a lot of these costs are factored in by your housing company. But you come to a certain point where you need to invest in a RIPE membership, where you need a router that costs 100k€. Plus a spare one. Where you need someone to watch the monitoring 24h sitting in the DC - just in case. Even if a lot of this stuff is free, it needs to be setup up an…

Here's the reason no one thinks about those things: no one makes their numbers public.

Or at least I've never stumbled across a blog post with anything like a line item cost range for everything that goes into DC or cloud networking.

And in the absence of transparency, yeah, people are going to assume they're getting screwed.

(I understand why this is. The networking free market seems to do a decent job at fulfilling needs, but it turns all those things into secret sauce that shouldn't be shared.)

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

#220

Post by ska »

lucb1e wrote: post #202
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…

> I guess I could write a very upset article about how my local mexican restaurant is SERIOUSLY SCREWING ME OVER with their drink prices I notice that I drink less (too little, even, if I'm out for an evening) because of these prices. If each drink costs a few euros for 200ml glasses, I'd be crazy to drink a liter if at home the cost is somewhere between negligible (tap water) and 1.50 for that whole liter. What I do…

People just don't behave rationally to this. Restaurants learned ages ago that people focus on entree pricing, as a result their is little to no margin on many main dishes (sometimes even negative). This is made up on wine, desserts, things that people have price elasticity on or poor information or both.

All that said, the operating margins on high end restaurants are ridiculously low. Franchises and fast food do better at this (economy of scale), but if it is a proper linen-table-cloths and local sourcing sort of place, they are playing with very thin margins at the best of times.

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