Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
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Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#2[deleted]
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#3With respect to varying EBS performance, I remember somebody once mentioning that they always provisioned 10 EBS volumes at once, wrote garbage to them all for 24h or so to warm them up, then benchmarked them and deprovisioned all but the fastest one.
How useful this is in practice isn't something I've tried to measure myself, but given the performance variance people report it might not be a bad idea to try for yourself.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#4I run my personal website and other small projects on VPSs I bought from OVH, and they're really cheap and work very well. Can recommend.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#5Something the article misses is complementary services. A lot of companies don’t care at all about X vs 2X for server cost, but if you lack certain features around say managed Spark job execution or serverless container deployments, it’s a total deal-breaker.
AWS, Azure and GCP tend to have the widest coverage of complementary services, along with all the other stuff like volume discounts and credits. I believe in many cases it could be perfectly rational to pay 2X more on just the server portion.
I also think support is another big issue, but GCP makes me second-guess myself, since they are the third largest provider but their support system is (literally) to just say “fuck you, read our upsell-laden docs.”
A good example is the way the GKE SLA page mentions a bunch of beta features of kubernetes will void your SLA credits, when in reality Anthos is not remotely close to being ready for production use by most teams and they have no choice but to rely on beta features in GKE. Multi-cluster ingress is a good example of this - “just switch to Anthos” as a proposed solution is literally equivalent to saying, “fuck you.”
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#6With respect to varying EBS performance, I remember somebody once mentioning that they always provisioned 10 EBS volumes at once, wrote garbage to them all for 24h or so to warm them up, then benchmarked them and deprovisioned all but the fastest one. How useful this is in practice isn't something I've tried to measure myself, but given the performance variance people report it might not be a bad idea to try for your…
Seems like a strange approach. It's easier to just continuously benchmark performance and kill machines that don't perform as expected. It's very easy to automate.
The article also doesn't mention spot pricing and per-second billing. Being able to burst up to hundreds of machines in minutes is super nice. I did some back of the envelope calculations for some build servers and it came out favorably for $cloud providers. Having idle machines also cost money.
For a highly optimized and predictable work load I'm sure providers like OVH can provide better bang for bucks. But that also assumes you don't use any of the cost reduction methods that are available with $cloud, like using spot pricing for variable load and reserved capacity for base load.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#7I think the main reason they can afford pricing their services that high is because of peer pressure - probably itself the result of clever marketing, or that would be a really happy coincidence.
I've worked in many startups now, several of them where I was the first (and for a while, only) developer and had to decide on the infrastructure. Each time I was going with OVH, and each time the CEO was trying to push for moving to AWS instead, despite having no clue what the difference may be.
Their problem was that "startups are supposed to use AWS". They were having impostor syndrome. One would come to tell me every month or so how "all his friends use AWS, and they say it's very good". An other one was afraid what possible investors may say when he tells them we're not on AWS.
If people will pay overpriced services to be with the cool kids, why bother competing on price?
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#8So...
The news is that AWS is overpriced, and overpriced by quite a lot.
This is not news.
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#9Are there tens of regions around the world? Are there multiple AZs within a region that are single-digit milliseconds apart? Can I autoscale? Is there a managed load balancer? Do I have to manage my own database instances and availability? Do I have access to hundreds of other services for things that I don't want to spend time managing myself?
Aren't we years beyond the 1:1 cost comparison for a single server argument?
Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
#10He kind of touches on this in point IV, but never mentioned specifically: the cost comparison is not AWS vs ovh. It's fragment-of-EC2 vs ovh.
If you need a predefined small number of VMs and no other functionality, it would be silly to go with AWS. But on the other hand, if you want a set of servers of a given class spawning on demand, with traffic coming in via load balancers, with integrated certificate and DNS management, with programmable lifecycle hooks, with integrated authn/authz, with full audit logs and account management, with configurable private networking to other services, etc. etc. ... You'll pay more than the price difference for someone to implement all of that from scratch.
Compared to this many other points sound like conspiracy theories. Meanwhile people either don't know they can do better, or use AWS because they want more features.