AWS is overrated. Most of the engineers and managers choose it because it's a safe choice for them. But in the long term the costs rise and you can't get away from it. I would even argue it's only for those who are afraid of command line.
AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)
41–50 of 163 posts
Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)
#42The complaints about cloud costs vs on-prem often compare apples with pears. Complaining that a machine that "I could buy for $1000" costs like $4000/year on cloud missing an enormous number of costs that people don't consider as well as the reliability/availability that you are paying for. Do it the same on-prem and you need to include the costs for:
* An air-conditioned room + maintenance (this could be very large if you are a big company) * How many staff at $50-100K per year to look after it * How to deal with internet reliability - do we need multiple high bandwidth broadband links at $1000+/month? * Ongoing op-ex costs for failed components. * Cap-ex replacement of hardware after 2-3 years
The point of the cloud is that these costs are wrapped up in your rental cost so of course it looks high.
If you have the people/skills and need control over exactly how your hardware is provisioned, go on-prem and good luck but plenty of us would rather concentrate on what we are good at and are happy to pay 50-100K per year to a cloud provider to do it for us.
Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)
#43It's interesting how AWS can keep so high prices on these. But it's just the beginning, the real money comes from when they convince you to run over a dozen vms/containers (all needing storage etc of course). You need to be triply redundant on 3 availability zones, (3x) both with the RDS db cluster and app containers (2x) . And then have separate dev/staging/prod envs (3x). That's 18x. You can then get a pat on the h…
This seems overwhelmingly pessimistic. VMs, serverless, and Kubernetes all panned without a suggestion of an alternative. The theme is knocking on AWS, so is your suggestion to go back to colos and self-hosting? Does that really sound better than infra-as-code?
Self-hosting and infrastructure-as-code aren't mutually exclusive.
Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, what do you think a fair price for s3 would be? I haven't had a problem with the storage prices, just egress fees can add up (I don't work for aws or a cloud provider, just curious)
To be clear, I have no special insight into underlying S3 costs. Only the perspective of a customer. My opinion is that Backblaze has done an awesome job of driving their storage costs down, scaling that up, and then reflecting that thriftiness in their pricing. Their technical communication (e.g. hard drive reliability reports, software engineering blogs) makes me believe in their competence. So when Backblaze sets…
B2 is definitely a lower tier of storage and I don't begrudge amazon wanting $23 for their top tier.
But the bandwidth is a huge issue.
Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)
#45aws can be so cheap. aside from egress bandwidth, it’s pricing is fantastic. crazy aws cost is always gonna be a case of your holding it wrong. either intentionally because it’s more fun, or accidentally. how to use aws well and cheaply: - scale to zero whenever possible (lambda) - use minimal infrastructure (lambda managing ec2 with route53 health check) - don’t use rds (s3+dynamo ideally, sql on i4i nvme if you mus…
> scale to zero whenever possible (lambda) AWS pricing is great because you aren't price-gouged if you don't use it? And your statement isn't really true. If you use AWS Lambdas do implement something like an HTTP endpoint, you still need to pay for stuff like AWS KMS and API Gateway even if no client hits you with a request. - use minimal infra (lambda managing ec2 with route53 health check) Above free tier AWS Lamb…
The API gateway might not be necessary any more:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-aws-lambda-funct...
Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems overwhelmingly pessimistic. VMs, serverless, and Kubernetes all panned without a suggestion of an alternative. The theme is knocking on AWS, so is your suggestion to go back to colos and self-hosting? Does that really sound better than infra-as-code?
Self-hosting and infrastructure-as-code aren't mutually exclusive.
This doesn't feel like a meaningful distinction.
You can go from an empty cloud account to a fully-provisioned application stack in minutes with the right infra-as-code. Provisioning infrastructure at that level is mutually exclusive with self-hosting.
But true, even with self-hosting, you can use infra-as-code at various levels (Ansible, OpenStack, self-hosted Kubernetes). It's just not really comparable to having your entire stack defined and provisioned that way.
Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)
#47aws can be so cheap. aside from egress bandwidth, it’s pricing is fantastic. crazy aws cost is always gonna be a case of your holding it wrong. either intentionally because it’s more fun, or accidentally. how to use aws well and cheaply: - scale to zero whenever possible (lambda) - use minimal infrastructure (lambda managing ec2 with route53 health check) - don’t use rds (s3+dynamo ideally, sql on i4i nvme if you mus…
> scale to zero whenever possible (lambda) AWS pricing is great because you aren't price-gouged if you don't use it? And your statement isn't really true. If you use AWS Lambdas do implement something like an HTTP endpoint, you still need to pay for stuff like AWS KMS and API Gateway even if no client hits you with a request. - use minimal infra (lambda managing ec2 with route53 health check) Above free tier AWS Lamb…
> Above free tier AWS Lambdas are terribly expensive when compared with EC2 alone. You're charged per RAM*time, you're charged per concurrent execution, and if your Lambda times out you have to pay for the re-execution.
They are dirt cheap for many use-cases where you application only runs a few times a day/hour and you need ad-hoc scalable performance. For example processing/creation of csv-reports - which is a common task in my organization.
Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)
#48The complaints about cloud costs vs on-prem often compare apples with pears. Complaining that a machine that "I could buy for $1000" costs like $4000/year on cloud missing an enormous number of costs that people don't consider as well as the reliability/availability that you are paying for. Do it the same on-prem and you need to include the costs for: * An air-conditioned room + maintenance (this could be very large…
The complaints about the complaints about cloud costs vs on-prem often deliberately ignore that there is a spectrum of options between "cloud" and "on-prem". This is not a binary choice between these two extremes.
Your air-conditioned room plus networking can easily be rented from a multitude of providers, for example, in different variants from "el cheapo" to "ultra-high-professional with lots of fancy certificates". You can then place your own hardware in rented racks, you can buy your own racks and place them in rented space, or you can rent everything including the hardware.
Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)
#49Over the years, I've migrated from AWS -> Digital Ocean -> Wasabi/Hetzner for various compute/storage needs and I'm still surprised how AWS price hasn't come down considering many other options in the market. It feels like cloud computing & storage have really become commoditized with many viable alternatives but the price charged by Azure/AWS/GCP doesn't seem to reflect this.
Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Self-hosting and infrastructure-as-code aren't mutually exclusive.
This doesn't feel like a meaningful distinction. You can go from an empty cloud account to a fully-provisioned application stack in minutes with the right infra-as-code. Provisioning infrastructure at that level is mutually exclusive with self-hosting. But true, even with self-hosting, you can use infra-as-code at various levels (Ansible, OpenStack, self-hosted Kubernetes). It's just not really comparable to having y…
Perhaps I am confused or we are talking about different things and consequently talking past each other, but I can literally open a new AWS/GCP/Hetzner/DO account, plug the credentials into my local configuration (in code), and then run a command with NixOps to provision an entire network of machines with custom specifications, and to automatically install all the software I need on those machines.
Perhaps you aren't familiar with what NixOps and similar tools can give you?