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Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

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Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at AWS and I think there's definitely some similarities and differences. We do share our backbone with CloudFront, and hence our video traffic, of which there's quite a lot these days. We also advertise our network ranges broadly, it's our mission to carry the traffic as much as possible ourselves. So those aspects are very similar. But a genuine difference is that we don't try to operate a global "seamless" n…

>For example, with global networking then a misconfiguration or error can more easily propagate globally and bring everything down. This sounds like Nassim Taleb's antifragile meme [1]. If I was running IT for some large enterprise (which I'm not!) then I might replicate services on both AWS and Google Cloud. A bit like Apple try to have more than one supplier for their hardware components. [1] https://en.wikipedia.o…

You don't always need to have enterprise $$$ to take an antifragile approach though.

I'm mirroring my private Git repositories between Gitlab.com and Bitbucket, which can be done for $0.

I might even end up paying for the bottom end Github.com ($7 per month) and Gitlab ($4 per month) accounts and have three way redundancy.

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#42
post #13

Forgive me for a dumb question from someone who doesn't do cloud computing currently : the units are really $/GB/time period, yes? What is the time period? One hour? day? month?

AWS bills instances hourly; both Azure and Google Cloud bill by the minute (albeit with a minimum of 10 minutes). For data analytics that you want fast turn around time for, this ends up being a big deal: a 30 minute job is literally 2x less expensive than "round up to an hour". This also shows up in auto scaling of services, since a standard business day of traffic obviously only has a fairly short actual peak combined with what is ultimately fairly short term load.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#43
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem pretty comparable to me? Cross-region is $0.02, inner-zone is free, and cross-zone is free or $0.01. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

I could have sworn AWS prices cross-zone used to be higher maybe this changed recently. Or... I was just wrong. :-)

Don't feel bad, I'd forgotten this one: "Using a public or Elastic IPv4 address => $0.01 per GB". I'm sad we still don't have a proper split horizon DNS to encourage internal IP usage, but I can't imagine charging for it in the same zone.

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#44
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Cloud maybe is superior in the pricing of compute, but it is actually more expensive on network egress traffic, object storage and block storage. I recently created a simple tool ( http://theprice.cloud/ ) to compare egress traffic, object storage, and block storage cost among AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. It seems like Googel Cloud is the most expensive one in egress traffic and object storage.

Except that Google Cloud cross zone and cross region (US) prices are much less than AWS. Ingress Free Egress inner-zone Free Egress cross-zone in the same region $0.01 Egress cross-region within the US $0.01 See: https://blog.elasticbyte.net/comparing-bandwidth-prices-and-...

Which is its own form of complexity.

All these cloud offerings are priced so complex you can pretty much expect some nasty gotcha unless you spend an inordinate amount of time modeling your workload and traffic patterns.

And if something changes you can do it all over again.

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#45
post #23
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Cloud maybe is superior in the pricing of compute, but it is actually more expensive on network egress traffic, object storage and block storage. I recently created a simple tool ( http://theprice.cloud/ ) to compare egress traffic, object storage, and block storage cost among AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. It seems like Googel Cloud is the most expensive one in egress traffic and object storage.

Our egress pricing (from all sources) is certainly higher because we operate a private backbone rather than just dumping your packets straight onto the internet. Your site seems to be hugged to death (so I can't see it), but there are lots of gotchas with S3 pricing (like rounding up file sizes with Infrequent Access and Glacier) that in our experience means our customers come out ahead. Glacier and Coldline also are…

Yes, I totally agree S3 pricing can be complicated with IA, Glacier, RRS, etc.

And it also gets complicated when comparing network egress, when region to region and egress to different parts of the world are taken into consideration. And GCP is actually more complex in the sense because it charges different prices for different egress destinations and AWS in comparison is one price for all of the world.

The most challenging part of making this tool is instead of displaying tons of options and dropdowns, I try to simply enough so that people get a general idea of the cost comparison of three major cloud providers, but not too simple to distort the reality.

And WOW, this is my first time getting "slashdotted". Very surprised to see the enthusiasm. The original "Show HN" is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14582181, and you are welcomed to continue the discussion there

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#46
post #20

Pricing is yet another area where Google Compute Engine is superior. Automatic sustained use discounts[1], the ability to commit long term to a certain amount of cpus and memory and get a discount without any upfront cost[2]. Extended memory[3], basically you can craft a VM instance of any size. Need just 1 cpu but 32 GB of memory, no problem. AWS on the other hand... A labyrinth of pricing tables, spot instances, EB…

Google Cloud maybe is superior in the pricing of compute, but it is actually more expensive on network egress traffic, object storage and block storage. I recently created a simple tool ( http://theprice.cloud/ ) to compare egress traffic, object storage, and block storage cost among AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. It seems like Googel Cloud is the most expensive one in egress traffic and object storage.

WOW, this is my first time getting "slashdotted". Very surprised to see the enthusiasm. The original "Show HN" is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14582181, and you are welcomed to continue the discussion there

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#47
post #46
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Cloud maybe is superior in the pricing of compute, but it is actually more expensive on network egress traffic, object storage and block storage. I recently created a simple tool ( http://theprice.cloud/ ) to compare egress traffic, object storage, and block storage cost among AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. It seems like Googel Cloud is the most expensive one in egress traffic and object storage.

WOW, this is my first time getting "slashdotted". Very surprised to see the enthusiasm. The original "Show HN" is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14582181 , and you are welcomed to continue the discussion there

Lol I'm new, what's getting "slash dotted?"

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#48
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WOW, this is my first time getting "slashdotted". Very surprised to see the enthusiasm. The original "Show HN" is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14582181 , and you are welcomed to continue the discussion there

Lol I'm new, what's getting "slash dotted?"

> When an internet server or item is shut down, canceled, closed or crashes because of the instant popularity from a community.

But if you're wondering what the word comes from, slashdot.org

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#49
post #16
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. So the Show HN page says you can barely go below $5 per gigabyte with on-demand pricing. OVH RAM instances consistently cost 1.33 $/GB for a machine with 30, 60, 120 or 240GB of RAM.

If all you need is compute and RAM, then OVH dedicated machines are a great choice; I used them for a long time myself and would again for personal stuff. That said, it's important to remember that focusing on that to the exclusion of turn-key services (RDS has saved clients of mine tens of thousands of dollars in billable hours just by itself) doesn't do you so well once you need more than that.

OVH have a beta RDS-like service. https://www.runabove.com/index.xml

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#50
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all you need is compute and RAM, then OVH dedicated machines are a great choice; I used them for a long time myself and would again for personal stuff. That said, it's important to remember that focusing on that to the exclusion of turn-key services (RDS has saved clients of mine tens of thousands of dollars in billable hours just by itself) doesn't do you so well once you need more than that.

OVH have a beta RDS-like service. https://www.runabove.com/index.xml

When they have RDS and Redshift and and Athena and SQS and SNS and when they have a fully-functional API that crosses every platform I need to write code against and years of a proven track record of stone-cold simplicity and success, I am sure I will take that into account.

Time is valuable. AWS/GCE/Azure have a huge head start in making us more productive.

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