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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

#61

Post by alex_lav »

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…

Hiding blatant fraud behind the label of “convenience”. Every industry. Pay for Amazon prime to get 2 day shipping “for free”. Item arrives in six days. Prime does not get refunded.

Pay +10% for “priority” rides in Lyft, supposed to arrive in 1-5 minutes, whereas “regular” is 7-15. Car shows up in 18 minutes. Priority payment does not get refunded.

Honestly what’s even the point in caring anymore. Living in America is about getting grifted until you can hopefully figure out your own grift. The irony of posting this thought on this website is intentional.

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

#63

Post by spacebanana7 »

Gbox4 wrote: post #43

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. ~72…

Could it be a discount for purchasing an entire month’s worth of capacity? Even if so, such costing plans should be explicit in the article

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

#64

Post by fancyfredbot »

Gbox4 wrote: post #43

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. ~72…

The whole thing is nuts. They have the wrong costs multiplied by the wrong time period to get the wrong answers. https://coreweave.com/gpu-cloud-pricing says an A100 40GB NVLink is $2.06 whereas the article says $2.39.

That's $1483.20 a month, whereas the article says $1200 and should say $1720 if they'd got the maths right.

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

#65

Post by thorncorona »

dinvlad wrote: post #50
zeroxfe wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

You can also evidence of this on their 10-Q :^)

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

#66

Post by Onawa »

Gbox4 wrote: post #43

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. ~72…

I think your guess of AI generation makes sense for the math discrepancy.

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

#67

Post by thfuran »

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…

>hook pricing (aka up front pricing that looks low and turns out high) is only rational.

Yes, many deceptive business practices are rational acts on the part of the businesses. That doesn't mean they should be tolerated.

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

#68

Post by ptero »

It seems to be that a large part of the AWS business model is the revenue received as a fledgling startup tries to grow (and ideally succeeds) into a large company.

As a small tech startup, an easy button for compute needs is perfectly sensible, as it allows focusing on the product. If the startup grows switching becomes more expensive, so AWS gets its money as long as the amounts are not seen as the main cost driver. That stage, I think (with no hard data), is the AWS sweetspot. The company is paying a lot for AWS, but does not yet want to do a full analysis, hire dedicated cloud cost optimization staff and deal with friction of switching.

If the startup grows stable and profitable it will likely do a proper cost analysis and make AWS bills saner, maybe with a mix of on-prem, AWS and non-AWS cloud services. But that requires a stable period, both in time and in functionality, which is not something that an unprofitable startup has.

I think with the end of ZIRP and tighter access to VC funds the number of startups that can afford losing a lot of money to go through an explosive growth period will shrink, and so will the AWS profits.

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

#69

Post by cpill »

tempest_ wrote: post #38
candiddevmike wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, the big thing holding back customers (especially smaller ones) from going on-premise these days is networking. Getting a fat pipe similar to what you get with an instance on a cloud provider can be prohibitively expensive (internet service, gear, staff, etc), especially when you want it to be highly available.

It is really the second one. The minute you want a second site or even HA at a single site the complexity and costs start to explode.

k3s is very simple to setup and and nodes to. if the machines are on the same LAN or the internet then it's not such a complex job albeit you need to know the basics of kubernetes.

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

#70

Post by ctocoder »

https://console.crusoecloud.com/request

They are providing H100s, A100s, L40s for very cheap. They also do not charge for the network usage. I Highly recommend them as the price per flop is unbeatable anyplace, and they have over 4000 gpus to use at a time.

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