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Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

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Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#111

Post by depr »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #78
danw1979 wrote: post #25

I’ve loved using Hashicorp products for many years but I have (despite often being in a position to do so) failed miserably to engage in any kind of commercial relationship with them. Their pricing has always been opaque. Despite trying my hardest, even multiple phone calls with their sales teams, I never got even a sniff of how much it would cost for enterprise deployments of Hashicorp products at any of my clients.…

I can give an insight! We tried buying into Vault Enterprise and let me tell you, it was incredibly expensive. We're talking Splunk levels of prohibitive cost here, maybe even worse. Their pricing models are actually insane. For Vault Enterprise, you buy into a fixed limited number of clients with a pricing ladder that would make Apple blush. You start at 100 “service tokens” with the next level being 1000, 2500, and…

Did you end up running the free version, or some alternative?

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#112

Post by latchkey »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #96
latchkey wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you pick a proprietary solution for a small dev shop?

Less people available to own self-hosted solutions. Proprietary also can mean a well-funded product with money allocated to DevEx and ease-of-use.

> Less people available to own self-hosted solutions.

There are other ways that are not proprietary and don't require self-hosting.

> Proprietary also can mean a well-funded product with money allocated to DevEx and ease-of-use.

How did that work out for Heroku?

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#113

Post by janejeon »

marcinzm wrote: post #101
s17n wrote: post #27

All these companies saw Snowflake's success and thought, "we want to use some kind of usage based pricing scheme to capture the value that we provide". Implicit in this thought process is that the price should scale in an unbounded way - if you're providing X value for a company with 10M revenue, you should be providing roughtly 1000X value to a company with 10B revenue. And it may be true that you are providing 1000…

The problem is that the value Terraform brings and the value Terraform cloud brings do not scale the same way. Hashicorp prices as if they did.

This is a great point.

I get that companies want to price their products in a way that they don't leave surplus value on the table (i.e. the more value a customer gets out of it, the more expensive the product gets), but the fundamental problem is that it's... so hard to actually "judge" the value that's being created by using the product in many cases.

In such cases, probably for the best that companies err on the side of caution with some formula they're sure is below the actual value but isn't too far away.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#114

Post by collingreen »

kmeisthax wrote: post #107
s17n wrote: post #27

All these companies saw Snowflake's success and thought, "we want to use some kind of usage based pricing scheme to capture the value that we provide". Implicit in this thought process is that the price should scale in an unbounded way - if you're providing X value for a company with 10M revenue, you should be providing roughtly 1000X value to a company with 10B revenue. And it may be true that you are providing 1000…

"Value-based pricing" is a code word for "reach into your customers' pockets and steal the spare change". It's the end game of monopolists, actual or wanna-be, and it's a good way to burn literally all of your goodwill as quickly as possible.

I completely agree and I've been trying to shout from the rooftops how this kind of greed inherently prevents banking value in your "brand" which means you'll only ever be one mistake, incident, or bad news story from a bunch of angry customers. This puts exactly the same pressure on a company and product as only shipping "barely good enough" functionality (which makes sense since you're ratcheting up the cost with this exact balance in mind). My take is that this is a really bad trade for a saas company/team trying to build for anything except short term.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#115

Post by DandyDev »

oldfolks wrote: post #109

Just use cloudformation

Please don’t take this advice as gospel. Cloudformation has a few problems:

- it only lets you manage AWS resources. And even if you’re not running multi-cloud, you’re bound to have a bunch of non-AWS resources like a DB vendor somewhere that you want to put on IaC as well

- it’s slow as molasses

- even if you feel HCL is bad, it will probably not be as bad as the huge swathes of YAML/JSON Cloudformation has you write

- despite what the console makes you believe, drift detection is practically non existent

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#116

Post by exponentialgenx »

Dudester230602 wrote: post #97
exponentialgenx wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

every word came from my own keyboard. It takes an hour or more to write a post and I don't have the time to hunt down the artwork - I lose enough sleep over my tech job, figured adding some fun art stuff would only be worth it if it didn't add to my stress - I do apologize if some folks are offended by using AI generated art though - I've created art myself in the past and the whole idea bugs me on a deep level, so I…

Two options are acceptable for me personally: 1) "Crediting" the source models explicitly. 2) Generating away or cleaning up afterwards: incorrect spelling, hands with unnatural fingers, non-sensical devices/symbols etc.

Thanks for this - I'm pretty new at blogging and it never occurred to me to credit the model. Next time I get on there I'll fix that.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#117

Post by glenngillen »

latchkey wrote: post #112
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less people available to own self-hosted solutions. Proprietary also can mean a well-funded product with money allocated to DevEx and ease-of-use.

> Less people available to own self-hosted solutions. There are other ways that are not proprietary and don't require self-hosting. > Proprietary also can mean a well-funded product with money allocated to DevEx and ease-of-use. How did that work out for Heroku?

I wouldn’t lay blame for Heroku’s financial problems at the feet of architecture choices it made customers adopt.

Also, Heroku’s buildpacks were anything but proprietary. They’ve been adopted by a bunch of other products.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#118

Post by Mortiffer »

s17n wrote: post #27

All these companies saw Snowflake's success and thought, "we want to use some kind of usage based pricing scheme to capture the value that we provide". Implicit in this thought process is that the price should scale in an unbounded way - if you're providing X value for a company with 10M revenue, you should be providing roughtly 1000X value to a company with 10B revenue. And it may be true that you are providing 1000…

Based on recent experience with large deployments at S&P500 types, IMHO the value snowflake providers to most companies can easily be deployed in house with either old school Hadoop,Spark, Hive or old school Impala, Hbase or more recently Trino.

The clients I had where we installed snowflake every is super worried about any additional copy operation because everyone is keenly aware of the unlimited cost. This makes getting shit done harder.

Clients that have a decently sized k8s cluster running Trino or old school Spark/Hadoop cluster on fat VM's you know what you got you know what your paying for you make estimate of how much ram / cores you need for certain workloads and once they are purchased your engineers get really good at squeezing as much work out of the given resources as possible. And no constant complaining in meetings about what potential extra cost this additional computation may have.

Also if other people working in other parts of your org don't run snowflake themselves you gotta pay for their snowflake usage on your bill or you pay for copying data back out to S3/ADLS/sFTP so that other departments can get to the results of your computations. And snowflake really doesn't like it when you do this, they even gave exporting data a new name, they call it "unloading" making you feel like your undoing something which you probably should not undo.... On that note, Snowflakes data export options are significantly underdeveloped in contrast to Databricks, Cloudera and also the original open versions Spark, Trino and Impala.

:)

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#119

Post by _cenw »

I managed my Cloudflare "zonefile" (mix of manual records and flags, but ends up with 50+ resources per domain) with Terraform Cloud when this change was announced.

Very shitty that a managed kubernetes cluster and a domain record can supposedly be boiled down to the same value now. My state is in S3 + Dynamo DB now.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#120

Post by Ekaros »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #78
danw1979 wrote: post #25

I’ve loved using Hashicorp products for many years but I have (despite often being in a position to do so) failed miserably to engage in any kind of commercial relationship with them. Their pricing has always been opaque. Despite trying my hardest, even multiple phone calls with their sales teams, I never got even a sniff of how much it would cost for enterprise deployments of Hashicorp products at any of my clients.…

I can give an insight! We tried buying into Vault Enterprise and let me tell you, it was incredibly expensive. We're talking Splunk levels of prohibitive cost here, maybe even worse. Their pricing models are actually insane. For Vault Enterprise, you buy into a fixed limited number of clients with a pricing ladder that would make Apple blush. You start at 100 “service tokens” with the next level being 1000, 2500, and…

So the pricing in essence defeats the whole fine grained permission model you should be using with Vault.

Also I wonder if same user having multiple different tokens would count as different tokens... Probably, just to inflate the number...

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