Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by slackingoff2017 » Wed, Jun 07, 2017, 4:22 AM UTC

garyclarke27 wrote: post #221

slackingoff2017 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As we've gotten more device computers have gotten more powerful. Server software has gotten better. HTTP has Keepalive and multiplexing now. Encryption and networking are offloaded to hardware and we have a lot more cores. I would guess a single server can handle thousands of times as many users as it could handle years ago. HAProxy, Netty, Nginx, and others can handle over a million (simple) HTTP requests per second…

Thanks for the info very useful, I didn't realise how unreliable AWS is for database servers. You're correct random unannounced shutdowns of db servers is just not acceptable for critical data. I will be launching a new business based on Postgres soon and the thought of this is terrifying. I'm not keen on the RDS type services or CoLo so this is an unexpected problem I need to overcome. Do you know whether VPS provid…

I would say colocation is most reliable. I'm sure dedicated VPS is better but most still reserve the right to pull the plug for hardware replacements. Colo isn't terribly expensive if you buy used equipment.

Really consider how important 100% uptime is though. Google and S3 have gone down multiple times without killing the internet or losing a ton of customers. Plenty of large SaaS providers still use maintenance windows. Heck, GitHub went down today. Not sure if you use ADP but that goes down for a couple days a week!

I know it's not the popular thing to do but you can get much better relative reliability by running a single database per tenant and running a limited number of tenants per VM.

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

#232

Post by mmalone » Wed, Jun 07, 2017, 5:07 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #224

mmalone wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert, but it's possible... from what I understand amazon does SDN on CPUs in Dom0, Microsoft uses FPGAs, and Google has burnt their own ASICs... those are all expensive options. Much more expensive than generic networking gear. Possibly 4-5x, but idunno...

Amazon and Google's custom NICs should be no more expensive than standard NICs. Microsoft's FPGA frankenNIC is definitely expensive though. Still, recouping the cost of the NIC by making internal bandwidth free and Internet transfers really expensive is kind of a weird way to do it.

I believe Amazon uses commodity NICs + iptables in Dom0 (based on rumors). I have no idea what a custom ASIC would cost, but I think the Jupiter networking gear / Titan NIC that Google built are pretty advanced components that would cost more than commodity stuff.

In any case, the hardware components are fixed costs. What's not fixed is the cost of applying routing and segmentation rules for each packet. There are scarce resources involved here: the hardware has limited memory and limited cycles. You're paying for the use of those scarce resources (e.g., having a memory resident stateful firewall rule for a TCP session). Charging for bandwidth isn't perfect, but it probably correlates pretty closely with the underlying resources and is a much more intuitive unit-of-value for customers.

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

#233

Post by mooreds » Thu, Jun 08, 2017, 1:56 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #146

_jal wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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…

I wonder if all these 10x network admins are now working at gcp/AWS/Azure.