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AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

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Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#101

Post by count »

andrewstuart wrote: post #17

It is strange that bandwidth/traffic/egress seems to be an afterthought in this post and I think the numbers in the linked blog post are wrong anyway. Bandwidth out of AWS is at best 9 cents per gigabyte, which is HUGE and for many applications the primary cost. Indeed when I saw the title of the post I thought "there's only one number you need to know with AWS, it's 9 cents per gigabyte". Please correct me if I am w…

I've moved probably thousands? of workloads to AWS in the last decade. Not a single one of them has been 'internet facing' or pushed much/any data out of the environment. Average bandwidth bills are I'd guess most of AWS's customers aren't....that kind of shop.

If you are, that's definitely something to be aware of though, no doubt.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#102

Post by rmbyrro »

tommek4077 wrote: post #83
rmbyrro wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't the only way, though. Cloudfront can distribute static content and backends running on Lambda@Edge. DynamoDB supports global distribution (eventually consistent). If you don't have massive scale, they're quite cheaper than self managing (infra itself and ops people involved). Yes, these services require adaptation to your old habits of freely controlling your own servers. As for vendor lock-in, even on EC2…

The original machine has a base-plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzelvanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-delta type placed in pane…

Not really sure this adheres to HN guidelines [1].

What's the substance here? What respectful idea are you adding to the discussion? Maybe this kind of comment would fit better a Facebook group?

If you like this community and benefit from "thoughtful" and "substantive" ideas shared here, I'd suggest reading these guidelines.

They are meant to avoid HN from descending to shallowness and disrespect, like many other communities around the web ended up.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#104

Post by brightball »

fulafel wrote: post #4

It'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 is the playbook though. It's used by everybody.

Microsoft, for example, has all of their certified developer programs. Company that use Microsoft development infrastructure like SQL Server end up getting huge discounts based on how many developers they have on staff with MS certs. This biases companies to hiring people with those certs, which reinforces the perception of value that developers have from getting the certs in the first place. Then when you have a ton of people on staff with MS certs you're NEVER going away from MS technology because at that point the company is so heavily invested in it.

It's very much an evil genius situation.

A few years back I worked for one of these companies and even though I wasn't doing much with the Microsoft stack in the company (they acquired a Rails company) I was still asked to go get an MS certification just to help with the discounts. I'm now a Microsoft certified HTML5/CSS3 developer, which after going through the IE6 years felt like the most ironic cert I could get.

The lock in mentality is very real though. As part of an architecture committee at that company, we went through many months of analysis for some of the issues that were being faced at the company. The root cause was simply limitations of SQL Server combined with horizontal scale out limitations due to licensing costs. There was absolutely nothing that could be done though, because the company wouldn't move away from SQL Server for any reason.

It was hard to watch.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#105

Post by count »

dinedal wrote: post #56
nathants wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

aws pricing is literally a catalog. what and how much you buy is kind of the whole thing. a subset of the catalog is good. aws core primitives are: - flexible - reliable - robust if your service succeeds, you will definitely want to move some components out of aws, but not all of it. aws can always remain the control plane. if you don’t need what aws offers, don’t use it. they offer it at a price, and it is what it i…

> if your service succeeds, you will definitely want to move some components out of aws, but not all of it. aws can always remain the control plane. Do you factor in the costs of dev time in a cross cloud environment at all? Nevermind all the AWS specific tooling and code you write, which needs to be thrown away and re-done to accomplish this? Don't get me wrong, I love AWS when I'm not paying the bill, it makes my j…

Do you factor programming language and library and operating system and cpu architecture into your vendor locking and specific tooling you need to write?

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#106

Post by sampo »

Why would you make line plots, with a category variable on the x-axis? Bar charts would be appropriate here.

Also, the lines seem to have way more line segments than there are labels on visible on the x-axis, so what do the graphs even mean? Are they based on a larger number of instance types than what the labels show? What are those non-labeled instances then?

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#107

Post by rmbyrro »

Frost1x wrote: post #90
tommek4077 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original machine has a base-plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzelvanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-delta type placed in pane…

For anyone reading this for the first time, well worth the watch: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag

Thanks for sharing, gave me context.

But the parent comment and video were not worth the time at all.

Maybe I'm failing to see the value? Happy to reconsider if you have more perspectives.

It seems to me such video will only serve as fuel for cynic behavior. Which I wouldn't like to see more on HN.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#108

Post by nojito »

brightball wrote: post #104
fulafel wrote: post #4

It'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 is the playbook though. It's used by everybody. Microsoft, for example, has all of their certified developer programs. Company that use Microsoft development infrastructure like SQL Server end up getting huge discounts based on how many developers they have on staff with MS certs. This biases companies to hiring people with those certs, which reinforces the perception of value that developers have from getting t…

You'll be hard pressed to meet the business protections a MS contract gets your organization by using someone else.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#109

Post by jstream67 »

usmannk wrote: post #14

Network Egress always gets a bad rap but recently it's the SSD cost on AWS/GCP that has me upset. IMO storage needs to take on some of network egress's heat :) $0.10 per GB-month for a basic SSD is outrageous compared to Hetzner et. al. a 4TB SSD for a month costs $400 on the big guys and like $50 on the commodity providers. It's not even a managed service!

I've always been bad at math but isn't 4TB for $400 approximately $0.10/GB ?

As another commenter mentioned EBS is quite a bit better than just a SSD in a number of ways. You can resize it, it has published resiliency numbers, quick and easy snapshots, etc etc

Also worth noting that the newest generation (GP3) is 0.08/GB/Month although like all things Amazon there are other charges to take into account.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#110

Post by thrtythreeforty »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #44
thrtythreeforty wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In what sense? The durability is 11 9s either way [1]. If you value all the different AWS regions, then it's true that B2 can't match that. I'd still argue the 4.6x cost difference isn't worth that for a lot of uses, though.

[1]: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/218485257-B2-Re...

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