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Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

techcrunch.com

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

#101

Post by sieabahlpark »

dheera wrote: post #53
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.

[dead]

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

#102

Post by eddd-ddde »

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!)

Also a dedicated VM is /literally/ a dedicated machine. It's in the name!

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

#103

Post by dinvlad »

ikiris wrote: post #92
thorncorona wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :^)

If you think offering a cloud service is at all the same as offering someone a box in a rack, I invite you to compete in the space.

Hetzner does have a cloud VPS option, which is still very affordable: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

This is pretty heads-to-heads with EC2, in terms of how it works behind the scenes.

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

#104

Post by tempest_ »

fwip wrote: post #83
cpill wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kubernetes is only the software layer, a lot of the cost is in the hardware/infrastructure, and in the salary for those experts.

Yeah, k3s doesn't buy 2 routers, 2 switches, 2 PDUs, 2 firewalls, 2 proxies to sit in front of k3s, 2 internet connections (if those are offered) etc etc the list goes on. Not to mention that HA things like to come in 3s.

Then if you are going to have remember that cloud networking is pretty beefy and if you want k3s to do distributed storage you will need some pretty beefy network hardware.

There are a lot of things hidden in the cloud costs that people forget about.

The one thing running your own stuff does allow you to do is make choices and trade offs. If this switch goes down and we have 6 hours of downtime to replace it what is that worth etc.

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

#105

Post by wmf »

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…

Hyperdisk is a SAN; it's not comparable to local storage. Unfortunately Google's local SSDs are also overpriced.

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

#106

Post by smabie »

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?

crypto hft

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

#107

Post by mywittyname »

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?

Anyone who has experience with AWS or is looking to hire candidates with known skills. AWS is the industry standard. A lot of quality candidates know it and use it, because it pays the best and has the most job opportunities. And most companies use it because they were first to market and its easy to find candidates.

I'd argue that startups should have a good reason for not using AWS. The costs for their basic services is not that much compared to the cost of development.

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

#108

Post by thaumaturgy »

thfuran wrote: post #67
doctorpangloss wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have begun to think of this as a "large population error", and I'm noticing it in a lot of different markets.

At small scales, annoying your customers is bad business. You only need to lose a few before it begins to hurt. Customer complaints are more likely to be a consideration in business decisions.

At larger scales, a business can begin to preferentially adopt practices intended to drive away some customers. Perhaps you don't want the "pathological" customers, to borrow one of Patrick McKenzie's terms. You can make more money with less effort by being more selective about your customers.

At extremely large scales, you largely stop thinking about groups of customers altogether. All of your decisions are driven by aggregates -- did all sales go up this quarter, or down? The effort required to do a deep dive into the behaviors and preferences of any individual market segment may not make sense anymore on a quarterly basis. At this scale, you might be able to afford to annoy tens of thousands of customers and still have a very nice graph next quarter.

So, when someone says a business practice shouldn't be "tolerated", that's a perfectly reasonable position, except it doesn't actually work for businesses operating at extremely large scales. It's too difficult for customers to organize a protest in a way that will influence that business's decision-making.

So much business has moved online in the last 20 years, while the US has leveled off at 80% urbanization over the same time period, along with more and more businesses congealing into BigCos, combined with the recent domination of private equity: lots and lots of things are now operating at a scale where customer concerns just aren't a part of the business model anymore.

Coffee shops, fast food, big-box retail, online retail, SaaS, PaaS: all of these can thrive while running on exorbitant pricing and abusive customer policies, because their volume of customers is so large that it's nearly impossible to be so bad that you'll piss off enough customers to impact your decision-making. (Unless you're Sony.)

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

#109

Post by ikiris »

dinvlad wrote: post #103
ikiris wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think offering a cloud service is at all the same as offering someone a box in a rack, I invite you to compete in the space.

Hetzner does have a cloud VPS option, which is still very affordable: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud This is pretty heads-to-heads with EC2, in terms of how it works behind the scenes.

So go with hetzner?

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

#110

Post by maxchehab »

Both Core Weave & Lambda Labs have fairly predatory pricing making it impossible to rent GPUs without a yearly contract.

This doesn't make sense for training models, where a training run is on the scale of days & weeks.

I wished that the techcrunch article mentioned other companies, like sfcompute, which offer hourly compute instead of yearly contracts.

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