Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground? • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by sokoloff » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 1:27 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #16

Few large organizations pay the on-demand price that this article uses for comparison. 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.

The article did reference the (1-year, upfront) reserved instance pricing. It quoted a price 17.5% higher than what I see in US-East2 (Ohio), but they didn't ignore it entirely.

My guess is that most people who would be buying such a server would be using a 3-year RI, which is (ballpark) "buy two years of RI, get the third year free".

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

#42

Post by WrtCdEvrydy » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 1:28 PM UTC

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.

AWS also gives you a lot of cost savings for using Spot and signing contracts with minimum spends. Only a small shop pays full price for anything.

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

#43

Post by Cthulhu_ » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 1:32 PM UTC

oriesdan wrote: post #7

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…

I've worked as a contractor for a CEO for two companies, in both he pushed for a full migration to AWS. Would not be surprised if he got a kickback from AWS.

Amazon is pushing AWS pretty hard in the C-level, I don't know if you've ever followed one of their certifications or landing pages, but they do their marketing really well.

Anyway, I do think a platform like App Engine / Beanstalk and other quick / easy / no setup deployment tools have a benefit, if you're not good at setting up servers.

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

#44

Post by ehnto » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 1:33 PM UTC

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.

I work in an ecommerce agency environment and it can be quite frustrating. Every client, no matter how small, has been sold the spiel and had some guy come through and build a boutique cloud infrastructure, CI pipeline and development VM. As if traffic will increase 1000% by next week with no prior warning. It just doesn't happen like that.

I spend half my time debugging Hyperscale Bullshit™ that the client never needed and that failed the moment the devops guy left.

If you want this stuff, you need a long term tech team, and a devops member on hand. Every time you hand your project around this stuff costs you hours. You also need to tell your devs to use the devops guy like tech support. They built this rickety tower of obtuse config files, make the devops guy fix it and don't let your devs spin their wheels for 4 hours before their assets compile on the Super Cool Distributed Docker VM microservice stack of teetering jenga blocks.

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

#45

Post by Cthulhu_ » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 1:34 PM UTC

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…

My current employer has the same setup (my colleagues are mostly linux nerds so comfortable with managing their own hardware), mostly because of security but I can imagine cost is a big factor as well. We'd need a development VM for each developer, additional VMs for nightly installs, a build server farm, and systems for hosting git, project management, etc.

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

#46

Post by prohor » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 1:38 PM UTC

GCP also has sustained-usage discounts, which are very convenient, as even without reservation as in AWS, you get up to 30% discount if you have more constant usage, but you still have the full flexibility of on-demand.

When it comes to pricing comparisons of cloud see Cloudorado: https://www.cloudorado.com/

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

#47

Post by bsenftner » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 1:38 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #40

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.

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 inves…

For my own startup, I built a small cluster of 17 servers for just beneath $55K, and that had a month-to-month expense of $600 placed in a co-lo. In comparison, the same setup at AWS would be $96K per month. And it is not hard, easy in many ways. Do not be fooled, the cloud companies are peddling is an expensive scam.

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

#48

Post by fabian2k » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 1:38 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #40

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.

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 inves…

I think 2x is a bit optimistic, if you just compare what kind of hardware you get by renting a dedicated server compared to EC2 it can easily be 5x or more. Of course that compares very different things, and doesn't mean that renting dedicated servers is always cheaper. The comparison gets much, much worse when significant amounts of traffic is involved. And scaling down isn't so much more difficult than with AWS within certain limits.

Comparing managed services like databases is maybe more meaningful than just EC2, but also so much more difficult.

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

#49

Post by twic » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 1:38 PM UTC

vegardx wrote: post #6

mst wrote: post #3

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…

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 provider…

> It's easier to just continuously benchmark performance and kill machines that don't perform as expected. It's very easy to automate.

It's also work you simply don't have to do if you rent hardware.

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

#50

Post by karlkatzke » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 1:39 PM UTC

Just migrated an ecommerce consulting client from a major VPS provider in the US to AWS.

There's two main reasons. One is that the traffic to this client is heavily driven by ad spend, and the site fell on it's face hard this past year any time a big spike got sent our way by a single or combination of ad vendors (which we can't really control in fine enough detail) -- facebook, by the way, is by far the worst about this. They can and will cause a thundering herd.

The second reason is that there's a bunch of scale up/down to services in AWS if you're doing it right. You're not buying a .16xlarge server in AWS to host your ecommerce site, that would be stupid, you don't need that 24x7. You're paying for a pair of .xlarge servers at a Reserved Instance rate, which is half the published rate. When you need to, your instance count (and your aws bill) goes up.

We couldn't do that at the VPS host we were on, so we kicked them to the curb. With AWS, we can handle the load spikes -AND- the total lower bill for a year came out much lower.