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The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

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Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#111

Post by alright2565 »

jeffbee wrote: post #48
Glyptodon wrote: post #6

I've always thought the mysterious bit was that cloud doesn't seem like it ever gets cheaper while the cost difference between cloud and own infra and profit associated with AWS suggest it could be. Is there something structurally wrong with competition in cloud?

That's not correct. Cloud costs have steadily declined since ~ever. This is due both to the inevitable march of performance, and inflation. It used to be 1 Ivy Bridge vCPU cost $71/month, in 2014 dollars, or $90 today. But today you can get a machine of the same size class, with a dramatically faster CPU, at $30/month.

Using cpubenchmark.net

- a Intel 3770K was released in 2012 for $330 retail, or 20 CPUMark/2012$. - a AMD 7800X3D was released in 2022 for $450 retail ($330 in 2012 dollars), or 105 CPUMark/2012$ or 77 CPUMark/2023$

Looks like consumer performance/price has improved by 5.3x.

I'm not sure what exactly the math works out here for cloud hardware, since I don't really have any performance numbers. I'd still expect it to be quite a bit less improvement, since it "feels" like server CPUs have gotten better at cramming more cores on a die, rather than increase each core's performance. Looking at Xeon Platinum 8480+ (2023, MSRP $10k), there's 56 cores@3154 ST CPU Mark, vs. Xeon E7-8890 v2 (2014, MSRP $6.8k) has 15 cores@2175 ST CPU Mark.

Assuming your cloud prices are correct, and with these rough performance figures, you're getting a 4.5x cloud performance/price improvement, significantly worse than with real hardware.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#112

Post by efxhoy »

If moving off the cloud was easy we’d all be doing it. For our org the risk is (unfortunately imo) bigger than the savings. I would love to pay hetzner dedicated boxes rates for compute but the amount of work to migrate everything would be huge.

Not to mention the difficulty in hiring people who are actually comfortable with doing the infra work of setting up all our services, with the required multi-AZ config, on bare metal. Its hard enough finding people who can reliably setup services in aws with terraform and keep them alive.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#113

Post by Karrot_Kream »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #88
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally find these discussions unproductive on HN because of how binary they become, but definitely once you go off the beaten path it seems a lot cheaper (sans power though) to run your own infra. I've been thinking of doing some data ETL for something that generates 1 GB / day and has retention for 30 days and it's much cheaper to host a Postgres myself at that scale than run it in the cloud. I could store in s…

I was an ops engineer at Fastmail. We ran our own hardware. A mix of Debian on one stack and SmartOS (Illumos from Joyent) and there were plenty of physical problems and costs. Now putting petabytes of data with replication and syncing and all that would have been a cluster F on the cloud, we missed out on a lot of the awesome newer deployment other tooling because we had written our own. Before I left we swapped out…

> The number one reason and tradeoff for cloud is uptime and availability and the cost of not having it

100%. I ran API networking teams at a Big Tech and I know the difference. My workload here is at a hobbyist+ grade, no controls, no compliance, best effort SLA. I don't want to ignore the reality that to get enterprise grade uptime and availability, it's really hard to do this on prem.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#114

Post by jeffbee »

alright2565 wrote: post #111
jeffbee wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not correct. Cloud costs have steadily declined since ~ever. This is due both to the inevitable march of performance, and inflation. It used to be 1 Ivy Bridge vCPU cost $71/month, in 2014 dollars, or $90 today. But today you can get a machine of the same size class, with a dramatically faster CPU, at $30/month.

Using cpubenchmark.net - a Intel 3770K was released in 2012 for $330 retail, or 20 CPUMark/2012$. - a AMD 7800X3D was released in 2022 for $450 retail ($330 in 2012 dollars), or 105 CPUMark/2012$ or 77 CPUMark/2023$ Looks like consumer performance/price has improved by 5.3x. I'm not sure what exactly the math works out here for cloud hardware, since I don't really have any performance numbers. I'd still expect it to…

The capex of the computer is only about a quarter of the TCO over a 3-year amortization. I don't think it is as relevant as you seem to believe. However, I have definitely seen some naive analyses along these lines written by people with a predisposition for moving out of clouds.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#115

Post by Karrot_Kream »

aftbit wrote: post #72
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always curious about the power cost here. Everyone I've talked to who runs servers at home either lives in a low COL area where electricity is cheap (and electricity is dirty, but I don't really want to get into that) or just pays the power as a sort of "cost of playing around" which is completely fair (it's not like I need to use my table saw at home.) Most folks I know who run servers use a lot more power than…

My rack draws around 750W at mid-idle (not totally idle but not doing anything big either). I have about $0.14/kWh delivered electricity cost in southwest Ohio. This means the rack costs me approximately $77 per month or approximately $920 per year. That's not a particular small cost, but it is far less than I would pay to host the same things at a professional data center, or shivers the cloud. If I really wanted to…

I'm posting this just to compare power rates not to win an internet fight. My power bill is tiered, and at the lowest tier I'm paying double your rates ($0.28 / kWh.) Once I add a rack like that on I'd probably be bumping up to the next tier which will increase my power to something like 2.5-3x that rate. Because of the tiered system even my non-server load will be metered at a higher cost. It's really not worth it here to run servers at home if I'm not being highly power conscious.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#116

Post by _jal »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #57
bamazizi wrote: post #10

Interesting to see this article again since it was the trigger of starting a homelab for me. After realizing cloud services are putting a major dent in my pocket to get a lousy startup idea off the ground, I started to wonder if there's "The Cheapest" way? (I'm not cheap but I'm very frugal) Nowadays internet speed is great to do self hosting. I have a business line internet at home with ~1gb up&down! Bought couple o…

I'm always curious about the power cost here. Everyone I've talked to who runs servers at home either lives in a low COL area where electricity is cheap (and electricity is dirty, but I don't really want to get into that) or just pays the power as a sort of "cost of playing around" which is completely fair (it's not like I need to use my table saw at home.) Most folks I know who run servers use a lot more power than…

My rack lives in an expensive energy market, and pulls just under 500W. Almost 40% of that is a Dell R430, which by itself costs about $50/mo to run.

Next time I have the energy (hah) for this flavor of home maintenance, the idea is to split the work it does off to a few fanless systems, I'm pretty sure I can knock at least 100W off that. Main challenge there is storage - I have a SAS shelf and need a low-wattage machine that speaks SF-8088.

Experimented some with a couple Raspberry Pis for some things, but they just don't seem built to run 24/7. One lasted about 4 months, the other died at about 12. (They PXEbooted, no local storage, it wasn't that.)

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#117

Post by avn2109 »

epberry wrote: post #15

This post, along with this Simon Wardley thread, https://twitter.com/swardley/status/1088780650860158978?s=20 , attracted me to finops as an engineering problem. Consumption based pricing is really tough for a lot of orgs to handle at the $1M+ range, so much so that it requires dedicated software to line things up. I started helping maintain https://ec2instances.info in my spare time and the code base is literally fu…

Thank you for ec2instances! I use it a lot and it's really great :)

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#118

Post by jodersky »

p1necone wrote: post #23
asah wrote: post #19

this makes no sense: can individual companies operate computing infrastructure more efficiently than cloud providers? if not, then instead of migrating just negotiate.

I think the biggest thing is that the minimum extra spend if you want in house managed infra is basically the salary of a full time sysadmin + hardware costs. You can pay for a lot of cloud resources for that much, even when the cloud resources are massively overpriced compared to what you could manage if you had more scale. The only other alternative is finding someone who's good enough at it to make that full time…

> I think the biggest thing is that the minimum extra spend if you want in house managed infra is basically the salary of a full time sysadmin + hardware costs.

The cloud promises to make admin tasks easier, however I have never seen it eliminate the role of a sysadmin in practice. In my experience, most organizations that run their infra on a cloud still have dedicated admin roles (often called "DevOps" or infra teams).

Hence, I think that the claim that a sysadmin's salary is an extra expense for self-managed infrastructure is exaggerated. You may need more sysadmins for achieving the same features in a self-managed setup compared to the cloud, but it is not a linear scale.

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#119

Post by Boatfaceing »

jeffbee wrote: post #109
sltkr wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The metric we are interested in is cost relative to self-hosting on similar hardware. So you can't factor in things like inflation and hardware performance, which equally made self-hosted solutions cheaper.

Good luck trying to write down that number. The cloud has list prices. Colo facilities can and will demand 500% rent increases when it's time to renew. You can't predict it.

[dead]

Re: The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)

#120

Post by AtlasBarfed »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #38
bamazizi wrote: post #10

Interesting to see this article again since it was the trigger of starting a homelab for me. After realizing cloud services are putting a major dent in my pocket to get a lousy startup idea off the ground, I started to wonder if there's "The Cheapest" way? (I'm not cheap but I'm very frugal) Nowadays internet speed is great to do self hosting. I have a business line internet at home with ~1gb up&down! Bought couple o…

After this talk [0] I had several most interesting conversations with media folks about the real cost and advantages of "cloud". One thing that came up is development. Modern devops culture is quite a good thing, and what's lovely about "cloud" - as in the ability to quickly buy compute and storage capability - is that ideas you would have tinkered with in on-prem labs (or across private sites) for months can be imag…

Yeah it's interesting devops is a lock-in on the cloud when (if you squint, a lot) it should be the opposite: there are devops tools that .... almost ... should make you more independent.

IMO it should be a sneaky powerful declaration by major corps that your app should be built to be deployed nearly at will on at least two clouds. I mean terraform is so tantalizingly close to it, until it isn't. This is like Bezos sending out the "thou shalt service everything".

AWS knows this and they are all about lock-in. They want you on the more complicated products, because those are really hard to move off of. Oh yes, don't use cassandra, use dynamo. Man you'll never move off that.

So if you let the devs have "you can develop on AWS" but then they have to deploy on Hetzner ... that will force the devs to be far more cloud-independent. I guess if I was a CIO (never let me become one) I'd try to institute that.

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