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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

#111

Post by duxup »

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…

> it isn't worth the brain damage to sell to customers looking for the lowest price

The cheapest customers are always the most expensive to work with. It’s a sad reality.

I worked at several companies who for some foolish reason saw the cheapo customers as some untapped market and when they raced to the bottom they lost every time.

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

#112

Post by xkcd-sucks »

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…

Less advanced economies have discovered this pricing innovation, but are generally not able to scale it beyond hostess bar scams and the like :)

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

#113

Post by wongarsu »

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…

Which is especially weird for the country that fought the cold war to show the supremacy of capitalism; a system that is based on market actors knowing the price and value of every product and service offered and making rational purchase decisions based on that.

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

#114

Post by whiplash451 »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #30
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.

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.

You can get much cheaper dedicated servers with alternative providers such as OVH.

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

#115

Post by superfrank »

tjoff wrote: post #78
superfrank wrote: post #73

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. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think that's intentional. I think it's just a byproduct of trying to build something that works for everyone and every use case. As you make your target market bigger and bigger, you continually hit edge case after edge case that you try and solve…

That would make some sense if the edge-cases didnt have 10.000% margin.

I've worked at companies that were spending 6 figures a month on AWS and we had dedicated AWS employees who helped us understand our bill and keep pricing in check. We also had GCP and Azure reps constantly reaching out to see if they could win us over by showing us how they could lower our bill. Overcharging enterprise customers for things they're not using is actually a risk to AWS as it gives customers a reason to jump ship.

The whales on AWS aren't overspending because AWS uses the granularity of their billing to make sure they aren't. That's how they keep the whales happy.

For the little guys, I'm not even sure it's worth AWS's time to nickel and dime them. AWS hands out thousands to ten of thousands of dollars in credits like candy. I'm pretty sure it's more important to them to lock in whales when they're still minnows than to bilk an extra $500 a year out of a 10 person start up.

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

#116

Post by dinvlad »

ikiris wrote: post #109
dinvlad wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Already do :-)

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

#117

Post by zb3 »

superfrank wrote: post #73
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. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think that's intentional. I think it's just a byproduct of trying to build something that works for everyone and every use case. As you make your target market bigger and bigger, you continually hit edge case after edge case that you try and solve…

So you're saying that they can't implement a hard limit, yet are able to provide hard-limited trials / student credits? It's impossibly hard to believe they couldn't implement the pre-paid model

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

#118

Post by whiplash451 »

oooyay wrote: post #98
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.

I suspect they're not getting a dedicated server from Amazon. Anyone doing that is either foolish or is so locked into AWS infrastructure that it cost-wise makes more sense than to expand a network to another provider. Fun times, indeed. What I started doing is just running my own "cloud" out of my house for personal projects. I have all of the things I need. There's some overhead in terms of maintenance and up-front…

You still have network performance limitations + the security aspects to run by yourself (as in: not getting your data drive encrypted by a ransomware)

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

#119

Post by fffrantz »

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.

Agreed 100 percent. Software is the easy part. Getting HVAC, power and network up to the levels of cloud providers is difficult to get right and prohibitively expensive.

For instance, the cost for a pair of redundant symmetric gigabit fiber is in the thousands a month and may require tens of thousands of construction costs. These quickly add up, and the upfront costs can quickly reach six figures.

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

#120

Post by zb3 »

ikiris wrote: post #89
superfrank wrote: post #73

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. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think that's intentional. I think it's just a byproduct of trying to build something that works for everyone and every use case. As you make your target market bigger and bigger, you continually hit edge case after edge case that you try and solve…

Was it "I didn't understand it and/or put in the effort to understand it first" ? Nah it must be "theres a conspiracy to make it confusing so we pay more" AWS has one of the nicer to comprehend billing systems.

Is there a pre-paid option?
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