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Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

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Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#41

Post by ryandrake »

apitman wrote: post #22

Over the weekend a coworker was helping someone in our lab prepare data for an important conference talk. We accidentally ran up a rather large bill because while the EFS storage pricing was simple enough, the usage pricing bit us. It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. It feels weirdly similar to the US healthcare/…

> It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. It feels weirdly similar to the US healthcare/insurance situation.

Not just the healthcare situation, but everything. There's nothing much more stereotypically American than "not knowing what you're going to pay for something until you're billed." Dozens of little fees on your cable or ISP bill, resort fees in hotels, service charges on your restaurant bill, fees on car rentals, fees from your bank when you so much as breathe on your account, and of course sales taxes which for some reason are never listed on the tag in any store.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#43

Post by Gbox4 »

A funny comment from that article:

"On CoreWeave, renting an Nvidia A100 40GB — one popular choice for model training and inferencing — costs $2.39 per hour, which works out to $1,200 per month. On Azure, the same GPU costs $3.40 per hour, or $2,482 per month; on Google Cloud, it’s $3.67 per hour, or $2,682 per month."

Am I missing something? I am sure I'm a bit rusty in math, but I can still handle a calculator. ~720 hours in a month (roughly), and that means CoreWeave would cost $1,720.80 per month, Azure is $2,448 per month, and Google Cloud is $2,642.40 per month.

Why are all of these numbers reported in the article off? Some slightly--Azure and Google Cloud are close, but CoreWeave is off by about 30%. I won't go further into the numbers as to why the author came up with these results, but I'm just wondering if this article was written by AI, which would explain why basic multiplication is incorrect.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#44

Post by zeroxfe »

matsz wrote: post #29
apitman wrote: post #22

Over the weekend a coworker was helping someone in our lab prepare data for an important conference talk. We accidentally ran up a rather large bill because while the EFS storage pricing was simple enough, the usage pricing bit us. It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. It feels weirdly similar to the US healthcare/…

This is precisely why I stick to dedicated servers for my own personal projects. $40/month for a machine, doesn't get any more predictable than this.

There's no way you're getting a machine for $40/month. :-)

Did you mean a dedicated VM or VPS?

(I have a bunch of actual dedicated machines with different providers, and this would save me a lot of money.)

(Edit: holy moly those prices are fantastic!)

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#45

Post by distantsounds »

zeroxfe wrote: post #44
matsz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely why I stick to dedicated servers for my own personal projects. $40/month for a machine, doesn't get any more predictable than this.

There's no way you're getting a machine for $40/month. :-) Did you mean a dedicated VM or VPS? (I have a bunch of actual dedicated machines with different providers, and this would save me a lot of money.) (Edit: holy moly those prices are fantastic!)

OVH and Hetzner have offerings at that price range. you can use a tool like serverhunter.com to find all sorts of economically-priced servers.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#46

Post by zackangelo »

Would like to take a moment to recommend fly.io for GPU workloads.

I've been building a prototype using them for the last couple of weeks and it's been great to use. I didn't have to jump through any hoops or apply for any quota adjustments to get started. And I especially appreciate how easy they make it to automatically scale your GPU instances to zero based on traffic.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#47

Post by javchz »

zeroxfe wrote: post #44
matsz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely why I stick to dedicated servers for my own personal projects. $40/month for a machine, doesn't get any more predictable than this.

There's no way you're getting a machine for $40/month. :-) Did you mean a dedicated VM or VPS? (I have a bunch of actual dedicated machines with different providers, and this would save me a lot of money.) (Edit: holy moly those prices are fantastic!)

OVH's so you start and server4you offer dedicated machines for around that price. For personal projects they work great

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#48

Post by brigadier132 »

rco8786 wrote: post #32
apitman wrote: post #22

Over the weekend a coworker was helping someone in our lab prepare data for an important conference talk. We accidentally ran up a rather large bill because while the EFS storage pricing was simple enough, the usage pricing bit us. It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. It feels weirdly similar to the US healthcare/…

> AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing My go to line here is that Cloud was a ZIRP. Like the whole entire thing. Took us ~10 years to wind up the cloud, and it will take years to unwind it, but the mass migration away is already happening. To be clear, I don't mean like AWS is going out of business or anything. Just that companies are a) realizing how insanely expensive it is, b) realizing ho…

I don't think people understand how absurd egress costs are. I was talking with some people in game dev because im making a multiplayer game and i wanted to understand what my future costs would be. Bandwidth was #1 over compute.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#49

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

rco8786 wrote: post #32
apitman wrote: post #22

Over the weekend a coworker was helping someone in our lab prepare data for an important conference talk. We accidentally ran up a rather large bill because while the EFS storage pricing was simple enough, the usage pricing bit us. It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. It feels weirdly similar to the US healthcare/…

> AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing My go to line here is that Cloud was a ZIRP. Like the whole entire thing. Took us ~10 years to wind up the cloud, and it will take years to unwind it, but the mass migration away is already happening. To be clear, I don't mean like AWS is going out of business or anything. Just that companies are a) realizing how insanely expensive it is, b) realizing ho…

> My go to line here is that Cloud was a ZIRP. Like the whole entire thing. Took us ~10 years to wind up the cloud, and it will take years to unwind it, but the mass migration away is already happening.

This is Hacker News echo chamber stuff. There is certainly no mass migration away from the cloud. Yes, I personally saw companies in the 2010s say "we're moving everything to the cloud!" without adequate planning or cost analysis and then saying "OK, everyone off the cloud" once they got an insane cloud bill.

But cloud costs can be managed, and for many, many companies the cost of hiring people to manage all this infrastructure and services is usually way more than a well-managed cloud project. Also, the canonical rationale I see on HN for moving away from the cloud is "I can just rent a box for $X/month". If all you're using the cloud for is a dumb, static set of compute, I agree that you can probably do it cheaper on your own. I know hardly any companies (from small startups to large enterprises) who use the cloud that way.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#50

Post by dinvlad »

zeroxfe wrote: post #44
matsz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely why I stick to dedicated servers for my own personal projects. $40/month for a machine, doesn't get any more predictable than this.

There's no way you're getting a machine for $40/month. :-) Did you mean a dedicated VM or VPS? (I have a bunch of actual dedicated machines with different providers, and this would save me a lot of money.) (Edit: holy moly those prices are fantastic!)

Yeah, Hetzner has 20 vCPU 64GB RAM i5-13500 servers for $40/mo:

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ex/

This is ~10x cheaper than the closest AWS option, and without the extra fees.

Also of note that Hetzner is profitable, which means AWS has been operating at an insane markup.

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