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UC Berkeley launches SkyPilot to help navigate soaring cloud costs

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Re: UC Berkeley launches SkyPilot to help navigate soaring cloud costs

#91

Post by ahelwer »

sremani wrote: post #80
mkhalil wrote: post #74

I remember when the "cloud" hype was first beginning to make a splash. A pillar selling point was "savings". "Reduce your costs", they said. "Don't worry about those expensive hardware costs", or management. "Only pay for what you need", they said. Until everyone was hooked and the tooling was everywhere. Even just putting the pricing for hardware/services aside, the bandwidth charges alone are quite amazing. Most ha…

"Simplify to succeed and Complicate to profit" -- (likely) Tim Ferris. I sat out of the cloud hoopla and it cost me opportunities - Now, I am dragging my feet into it to be employable.. but the Anti-Cloud (River?) is going to be a concept. 39 signals already did a blog post and change in strategy. I look forward to the economically lean years of 2023 and 2024 and HN front page articles about how moving away from Clou…

Per a recruiting email I received last year, I believe anti-cloud computing is called "fog computing".

Re: UC Berkeley launches SkyPilot to help navigate soaring cloud costs

#92

Post by acdha »

mkhalil wrote: post #74

I remember when the "cloud" hype was first beginning to make a splash. A pillar selling point was "savings". "Reduce your costs", they said. "Don't worry about those expensive hardware costs", or management. "Only pay for what you need", they said. Until everyone was hooked and the tooling was everywhere. Even just putting the pricing for hardware/services aside, the bandwidth charges alone are quite amazing. Most ha…

Savings is a really complicated thing to measure, especially when you're trying to accurately account for internal costs which aren't cleanly broken down per-project. It's very easy to get an itemized bill from a cloud provider which looks much larger than your internal service because the latter numbers don't include staffing or overhead costs (e.g. how much idle hardware are you paying for because the alternative is telling someone they can't have a VM until you complete a new procurement?). What I've found is that almost every time someone tries to get those internal numbers it goes the other direction by a significant margin because they weren't accounting for things like how much staff time they spend managing systems, especially for the compliance type stuff.

One really big factor here is opportunity cost: if it takes 6 months (not hyperbole in .edu) to get a new server from the enterprise IT department from request to being in service and correctly configured, there's a significant cost which you don't receive on an invoice. This is especially true if you're looking for any service more advanced than a bare Linux/Windows install where the staffing & internal barriers are going to dominate the true cost.

Network bandwidth is definitely the most egregious point to complain about with commercial cloud providers and it'll cancel out any other savings for some applications. You can negotiate significant discounts with most of them and for something like UC Berkeley I'd also assume they might be able to take advantage of things like AWS' cheaper peering using Internet 2, but it's still something I'd mention to your sales rep as a deterrent any chance you get.

Re: UC Berkeley launches SkyPilot to help navigate soaring cloud costs

#93

Post by boarush »

mkhalil wrote: post #74

I remember when the "cloud" hype was first beginning to make a splash. A pillar selling point was "savings". "Reduce your costs", they said. "Don't worry about those expensive hardware costs", or management. "Only pay for what you need", they said. Until everyone was hooked and the tooling was everywhere. Even just putting the pricing for hardware/services aside, the bandwidth charges alone are quite amazing. Most ha…

At my institute, we've been steadily expanding our HPC facilities and adding newer hardware for the SOTA research being done by faculty and students.

Also gives people exposure on how to manage their instances and tooling required around their projects, which I reckon helps in the long run.

Re: UC Berkeley launches SkyPilot to help navigate soaring cloud costs

#94

Post by nzealand »

acdha wrote: post #92
mkhalil wrote: post #74

I remember when the "cloud" hype was first beginning to make a splash. A pillar selling point was "savings". "Reduce your costs", they said. "Don't worry about those expensive hardware costs", or management. "Only pay for what you need", they said. Until everyone was hooked and the tooling was everywhere. Even just putting the pricing for hardware/services aside, the bandwidth charges alone are quite amazing. Most ha…

Savings is a really complicated thing to measure, especially when you're trying to accurately account for internal costs which aren't cleanly broken down per-project. It's very easy to get an itemized bill from a cloud provider which looks much larger than your internal service because the latter numbers don't include staffing or overhead costs (e.g. how much idle hardware are you paying for because the alternative i…

6 months is fast. I sold our first on premise customer. $1M internal budget to simply hook up the hardware. The project was delayed a year due to budgeting and logistical issues. And this is a large financial institution, which is used to managing on premise hardware.

Also, it's expensive, but cloud is a competitive strength. If you manage your own hardware or VPS, that is not only a reliability risk, but a huge competitive weakness in B2B. One of our competitors use "we are the only true cloud vendor" as FUD.

Re: UC Berkeley launches SkyPilot to help navigate soaring cloud costs

#95

Post by [deleted] »

mkhalil wrote: post #74

I remember when the "cloud" hype was first beginning to make a splash. A pillar selling point was "savings". "Reduce your costs", they said. "Don't worry about those expensive hardware costs", or management. "Only pay for what you need", they said. Until everyone was hooked and the tooling was everywhere. Even just putting the pricing for hardware/services aside, the bandwidth charges alone are quite amazing. Most ha…

[deleted]

Re: UC Berkeley launches SkyPilot to help navigate soaring cloud costs

#96

Post by julienchastang »

For those of you in US academia, checkout the NSF Jetstream2 cloud [0] available through ACCESS grants [1]. They have various flavors of VMs including regular, GPU, and large instances.

[0] https://jetstream-cloud.org/ [1] https://access-ci.org/

Re: UC Berkeley launches SkyPilot to help navigate soaring cloud costs

#97

Post by bluedino »

KronisLV wrote: post #43

Aren't AWS, Azure and GCP all comparatively expensive? They are good for certain workloads and it's good that this project exists, but if you wanted cheap cloud resources, you'd probably need to look at one of the smaller cloud vendors: Hetzner, Scaleway, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Contabo and others. Of course, if you need GPUs, things can get limiting.

Does DO or Vultr even offer the HPC instances AWS does? 96 CPU, 384GB, etc? Let's not even mention storage or networking.

Re: UC Berkeley launches SkyPilot to help navigate soaring cloud costs

#98

Post by josh_carterPDX »

I remember when Cloudability first did this to manage AWS costs. They ended up getting scooped up by Apptio, but what they built was pretty awesome. It was especially useful for big teams who often spun up a large EC2 instance for testing, but forgot to take it out of service.

Re: UC Berkeley launches SkyPilot to help navigate soaring cloud costs

#99

Post by master_crab »

bombcar wrote: post #84
master_crab wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don’t bother refactoring their application and leave whatever IIS garbage they have running on windows 20xx in a cloud instance (to say nothing about the windows licensing cost). Also universities don’t have the same cost models as companies. Their labs have less money - except those institutions with large endowments - but they all have access to near limitless “slave” labor in the form of grad students…

When I was involved with univs the labs were bursting at the seams with hardware, because companies abounded who loved nothing more than dumping product on us at cheap or free, especially if we'd get students using it.

Free stuff always helps. But it’s not the same as cold hard cash.

Re: UC Berkeley launches SkyPilot to help navigate soaring cloud costs

#100

Post by bombcar »

master_crab wrote: post #99
bombcar wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was involved with univs the labs were bursting at the seams with hardware, because companies abounded who loved nothing more than dumping product on us at cheap or free, especially if we'd get students using it.

Free stuff always helps. But it’s not the same as cold hard cash.

Oh, certainly. Most of the stuff was kinda useless and we repurposed massive blade servers to host some tens of email accounts, etc.
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