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Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

cerebralab.com

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Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#31

Post by ronyfadel »

kuon wrote: post #13

With the price of pro fiber (redundant with SLA) I recently moved some apps back to our own servers in house. This did cut the price down dramatically. I would not recommend it for super critical apps (except if you have your own state of the art data center, but I am not speaking about that), but having 5-10 servers in a secure cabinet will give you infinite flexibility for little cost. We pay around 5000$/y to keep…

I get it that you’re indie and running web services from home? If you’re willing to share, I’d love to see what kind of apps (that aren’t “super critical”) one can from a cabinet from home.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#33

Post by alex_young »

Interesting, but somewhat incomplete analysis IMO.

If you are running a billion + dollar budget for compute spending, you’re surely going to negotiate pricing with your vendor, and while that won’t bring things to parity, it will bring them much closer together.

If you are spending this kind of money, you’re likely doing a lot to get your workloads into some reasonably geographically aligned areas, and if you’re peering with other services, they tend to be running on AWS, which means choosing another provider can significantly increase those latency costs.

While we’re on the subject of bandwidth, what do you think data transfer pricing will be between your other cloud provider and this high compute instance you picked up on the cheap? Odds are they will more than negate your cost savings, and again at a latency cost.

Let’s say you really want to save huge amounts of money though. The easy answer is probably in moving to a spot instance targeted architecture where you can typically buy the same server from AWS for less than 20 percent of the on demand price. You can always fall back to on demand when they are not available.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#34

Post by KingOfCoders »

lvh wrote: post #26
KingOfCoders wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people use AWS because everyone uses AWS. Many of my clients have no need for AWS but still use it, at least until the VC money runs out. Usually then I have to go first, then servers are moving to somewhere cheaper when a new CFO comes in.

It's possible that "many" firms do this, but given AWS' growth numbers that would imply they don't really spend meaningful amounts to begin with. Counterpoint: I've seen a great many false economies with people trying to go on-prem and do alternative hosting because they don't think the AWS premium for e.g. GPU instances is worth it. I don't think that has generally worked out well.

"It's possible that "many" firms do this, but given AWS' growth numbers that would imply they don't really spend meaningful amounts to begin with."

I could spend a million EUR a year on AWS without the need for most of the services of AWS?

But it YMMV and 1M EUR/y is not meaningful, perhaps we differ there.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#35

Post by qaq »

lvh wrote: post #26
KingOfCoders wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people use AWS because everyone uses AWS. Many of my clients have no need for AWS but still use it, at least until the VC money runs out. Usually then I have to go first, then servers are moving to somewhere cheaper when a new CFO comes in.

It's possible that "many" firms do this, but given AWS' growth numbers that would imply they don't really spend meaningful amounts to begin with. Counterpoint: I've seen a great many false economies with people trying to go on-prem and do alternative hosting because they don't think the AWS premium for e.g. GPU instances is worth it. I don't think that has generally worked out well.

There is no good data to prove either statement. You could def prove that for some large scale onprem for a given type of problem is cheeper than the cloud.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#36

Post by KingOfCoders »

anticristi wrote: post #23
jdub wrote: post #9

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…

I wanted to write the same. One server in my basement never compares to a highly-available, compliant and secure infrastructure, surrounded by managed services. It's like complaining that taxis are more expensive than driving your own car.

Every infrastructure is as secure as you configure it to be without bugs. Not that AWS doesn't allow for secure infastructure and you're basement is secure by default, but as a consultant I see clients when I ask them about security saying "We're secure because we use AWS.".

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#38

Post by owenmarshall »

legulere wrote: post #20
jdub wrote: post #9

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…

The question is wether that is worth the lock in.

I worked at a job that had a multi year contract with a hosting company. We paid eight figures annually to lease MIPS on a mainframe.

That’s vendor lock in. AWS “lock in” isn’t, it’s “I could terminate for convenience any day I wanted to, but the ROI isn’t there”.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#40

Post by Cthulhu_ »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #18
viraptor wrote: post #10

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…

Many people use AWS because everyone uses AWS. Many of my clients have no need for AWS but still use it, at least until the VC money runs out. Usually then I have to go first, then servers are moving to somewhere cheaper when a new CFO comes in.

From AWS' own marketing propaganda: How much would said clients have to invest in people and hardware otherwise? What if their application becomes an overnight success and needs to scale up fast?

Sure, if it's an established company then using their own hardware (and people to set up and manage it) might make sense; iirc Dropbox is a fairly recent big player that made that move. But otherwise it's a big upfront investment to make, and you can't know if it'll pay itself back.

So sure, AWS can be 2x or more as expensive as renting servers at a company like OVH or building your own datacenter, but it's paid by the minute if need be, not all in one go. If your startup or its VC money runs out in six months at least you can quickly scale down and pull out.

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