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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

#271

Post by ipython »

balls187 wrote: post #178
dheera wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You sort of have that already in the US for health, its tied to your insurance and its called max out of pocket. Of course it only applies to covered services, and insurance companies and medical providers don't necessarily make it simple to know what is and is not covered (though it IS improving). If you plan on seeking medical services without going through insurance, the ACA requires providers to provide you with…

> If you plan on seeking medical services without going through insurance, the ACA requires providers to provide you with a good faith estimate upfront.

That is truly funny. I have literally spent an hour across multiple agents to quote a single service out of pocket. I’ve done it multiple times across several providers. Every time it’s the same painful procedure where nobody can ever give you an answer.

I struggled to find the words to describe the way you’re treated when you ask for a quote. This is the best I’ve come up with: It’s like shopping at a luxury store with no price tags- if you dare ask the question “how much does this cost?” perhaps you don’t belong here.

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

#272

Post by ipython »

balls187 wrote: post #232
dheera wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its tied to your insurance and its called max out of pocket F that, if I paid for insurance I shouldn't have to pay anything out of pocket > If you plan on seeking medical services without going through insurance, the ACA requires providers to provide you with a good faith estimate upfront. F that, if there is any out of pocket payments at all, I should be entitled to estimates even WITH insurance and they should b…

> F that, if I paid for insurance I shouldn't have to pay anything out of pocket That's not how insurance works, bud. For one, you likely don't pay for insurance, its heavily subsidized by your employer, and they will determine which policies to offer you. For two, you share the risk with everyone else who has a policy with your provider. I could see an argument for insurance companies being legislated to force them…

> Sure, you are welcome to contact your insurance BEFORE you obtain services and find out what they will cover. In fact, its incumbent upon you to do that, and not expect HCP's to do that for you.

Had experience with that too. Insurance company will not give you a straight answer as to what’s covered or not- as for example the anesthesiologist may be out of network and you’ll never know until it’s too late. The health care provider won’t give you that info either. So you end up rolling the dice and hoping it all is covered at the end of the day.

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

#273

Post by oooyay »

whiplash451 wrote: post #118
oooyay wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I probably wasn't explicit enough with "cloud" but I mean running your own isolated workloads with at minimum virtual machines and virtual isolated storage (block or otherwise). From a topological perspective my home DC resembles most major clouds other than the fact that there are not two sites.

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

#274

Post by intelVISA »

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.

Yeh but a pragmatic decision like a $40pcm box won't go down well with your now very bored team of SREs, DevOps and distributed systems engineers(tm) who demand more playtime with the magic cloud toybox (for a 100DAU internal app).

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

#276

Post by relativ575 »

ipython wrote: post #272
balls187 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> F that, if I paid for insurance I shouldn't have to pay anything out of pocket That's not how insurance works, bud. For one, you likely don't pay for insurance, its heavily subsidized by your employer, and they will determine which policies to offer you. For two, you share the risk with everyone else who has a policy with your provider. I could see an argument for insurance companies being legislated to force them…

> Sure, you are welcome to contact your insurance BEFORE you obtain services and find out what they will cover. In fact, its incumbent upon you to do that, and not expect HCP's to do that for you. Had experience with that too. Insurance company will not give you a straight answer as to what’s covered or not- as for example the anesthesiologist may be out of network and you’ll never know until it’s too late. The healt…

> as for example the anesthesiologist may be out of network and you’ll never know until it’s too late

Are you sure you don't make this up? Any insurance that I've ever had always let you search if a particular provider is in their network. I just verified on the website of my current insurance. Dozen of anesthesiologists nearby are listed. In fact they often go out of their way to notify you if your doctors leave their network.

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

#277

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#278

Post by Havoc »

mym1990 wrote: post #6

Isn't the mid/late game of all of these alternative clouds going to be the same as the big cloud players...get customer lock in and then prices slowly creep up until its kind of a wash?

Most are still quite far away from big cloud lock in levels.

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

#279

Post by Scarbutt »

distantsounds wrote: post #45
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!)

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.

Does OVH asks for passport verification too, like Hetzner?

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

#280

Post by [deleted] »

thundergolfer wrote: post #151
Palmik wrote: post #124

I really don't get this. Most of these low cost providers actually re-rent GPUs from Azure, AWS or GCP (*), yet they offer much better on-demand pricing (as low as $3.8/hr for H100 sxm and $2.5/hr for PCIe). And it's a fact that you can get even much better on-demand (not to mention reserved) pricing from the big clouds if you're a decent startup with connections. If one of these clouds offered fair pricing to SMBs,…

It's the opposite of what you say. Slim to none of the alternative cloud providers re-rent their GPUs. Coreweave, Fluidstack, Lambda Labs, Paperspace, Cudo Compute, Hydra, Datacrunch.io, Vultr, Crusoe Cloud, SF Compute. As far as I can tell none of these providers give you a GPU originating in Azure, AWS, or GCP.

[deleted]
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