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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

#51

Post by jedberg »

leetharris wrote: post #40
jedberg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I head up Product at Lambda. We are an NVIDIA preferred partner (and keep winning the preferred partner award). I don't know what the allocation numbers are for other companies, but we get a lot. It's in NVIDIAs best interest to spread the love around and make sure all the GPUs don't go to the hyperscalers.

I head engineering at Rev and every time we talk to Nvidia about GPUs they tell us to go to you guys. Every time. They really like Lambda!

Very happy to hear this!

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

#52

Post by doctorpangloss »

ryandrake wrote: post #41
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 you…

People complain about this relentlessly, but never change.

Additionally, every single business owner I know complains that whatever it is they're selling, (1) it isn't worth the brain damage to sell to customers looking for the lowest price, (2) as long as people comparison shop in a harebrained way, hook pricing (aka up front pricing that looks low and turns out high) is only rational. It's not like they're providing a bad service for the cost.

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

#53

Post by dheera »

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/…

We really need laws that allow customers to set a legally-binding max spend per month on any service, after which it's upto the company to suspend services.

This should apply to everything -- cloud compute, healthcare, phone bills, internet services, everything.

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

#54

Post by hot_gril »

015a wrote: post #16

We're absolutely seeing the same thing even in non-GPU traditional servers. Here is an estimated monthly cost breakdown for a new GCP instance type, the n4-standard-2, in us-central1: 2 vCPU + 8 GB memory: $69.18 10 GB Hyperdisk Balanced: $0.80 3060 provisioned IOPS: $15.30 155 MB/s provisioned throughput: $6.20 Total: $91.48 Like, you can tear apart that $69/mo for 2vCPU + 8gb of memory, no problem. That's utterly i…

Clouds have historically been designed for high-availability workloads, which are very hard to handle yourself. It doesn't always make sense for experimentation or AI training, though they might be trying to optimize more for that now. At past startups, we were fine just buying machines to run on-prem.

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

#55

Post by apitman »

brigadier132 wrote: post #48
rco8786 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've done a decent amount of research on the cheapest VPS providers for network-heavy applications. Take a look at Hetzner and OVH if you haven't already. Also here's a useful comparison:

https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress

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

#57

Post by pixl97 »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #52
ryandrake wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 you…

People complain about this relentlessly, but never change. Additionally, every single business owner I know complains that whatever it is they're selling, (1) it isn't worth the brain damage to sell to customers looking for the lowest price, (2) as long as people comparison shop in a harebrained way, hook pricing (aka up front pricing that looks low and turns out high) is only rational. It's not like they're providin…

I mean this is why a lot of first world countries have consumer protections that demands the retailer/service publishes prices up front. Course in the US there is quite a counter lobbyist group that prevents just that from happening.

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

#59

Post by nothercastle »

autoexecbat wrote: post #20
rvba wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldnt NVIDIA auction some to get best price? I mean locking customers long term is probably better, but a certain % of product still vould be sold for a spot price? This made me wonder what is the optimum split on that - obviously depends on your market placement, but isnt nvidia basically a monopoly now?

At some point, nvidia does have to worry about amd getting their act together once they've annoyed all the current customers

Amd will never figure out drivers and software stuff. That’s always been their weakness

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

#60

Post by jedberg »

drdaeman wrote: post #31
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you rent a dedicated server from AWS, you will be hit for various additional fees which will likely dwarf that $40/month. So the issue here is not really shared vs dedicated instances. The issue here is that a particular cloud provider (namely AWS) has set up an opaque fee structure.

> If you rent a dedicated server from AWS Who, in their right mind, goes for a bare metal to AWS, when there are so many decent and time-tested options out there?

Data Gravity. If you already have all your data in AWS, and your app that is generating new data is in AWS, it makes a lot of sense to get bare metal in AWS to do batch workloads on that data, so there is no egress fees.
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