11–20 of 338 posts
But it's not AWS. They don't have the same ecosystem of services. Consider, IAM, for example. Premium pricing for a server that has access to that seems normal to me.
On the other hand, he didn't include egress charges. That makes the gap even wider for many use cases.
The biggest example is probably IAM, which makes it easy to control which servers can take what actions on which other services. And can also be integrated directly into external tools like Vault.
Want to use service discovery? No need to set up Consul/Istio/etc., just use the managed service. Same with load balancers, and VPCs, and SSM, and route53, etc.
Sure, in 2020 none of those services are that hard to replicate pieces of, and open source tools abound. But setting up those tools all takes time.
Only other nit is that the article makes it sound like Terraform and IaC is meant to abstract away AWS vs GCP such that one terraform module _could_ be deployed to either just by changing some string value from "AWS" to "GCP". I don't believe any serious (and good) efforts are being made in that space, and you won't find any popular modules like that on https://registry.terraform.io/.
With 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…
Also neighbours will change over time so testing for 24h and committing to a volume long-term doesn't sound optional.
By reserving the instance, or using spot, the costs of these instances come way, way down, usually 50-80%.
I’m not trying to defend AWS here, but for an accurate comparison, it’s best to use the numbers that people are actually paying in practice.
He 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 man…
I 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…
Are 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 argume…