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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

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You guys have teams that decide the infra they run ?

If they manage it in my company at least of course, the real question is if they want to manage it (and know what that means). Usually they don't, in my experience.

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

#302
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? The big bare metal providers have multiple datacenters with fat pipelines and peering. You can put those geo-separated servers in the same subnet. Europe and US is covered, it looks like Asia a black spot for Hetzner, I will give you that. I doubt that so many business have such size and global reach, that world wide latency is a priority. If it would be, the average site would not connect to 20 dom…

Sure, go build your own less reliable cloud. But don't pretend that single box pricing is comparable to single cloud service as a result.

I don’t know why you are suggesting that people will build unreliable things. My company’s first day of AWS was the first time AWS had a major outage. We were sold on more reliable, but I can tell you AWS is just as reliable as home grown BS, if not less reliable. The biggest difference is what you do during downtime: in AWS, you refresh status pages. In your actual hardware, you’re actually problem solving and able to build/deploy workarounds to get back working within 30m.

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

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When the price label is affixed by the factory/warehouse then you would have to track where everything is going and be unable to share inventory. Price tags are pretty much universally handled at the stores. There are some goods where the price tag is attached, but that's more the exception and not the rule. This is a solvable problem. So much so that if you've traveled in most nations you'll see that all prices in…

> Price tags are pretty much universally handled at the stores. Advertising isn't. If the same ad is viewable by people in different states, what price are they supposed to put on it? Shouldn't this be the same price as what they show in the stores, or else people will have trouble knowing if the advertising was deceptive? > This is a solvable problem. So much so that if you've traveled in most nations you'll see tha…

I have no idea what you are going on about. If you advertise 9.99, it’s 9.99. Sales tax isn’t THAT different between jurisdictions, so we are talking about the seller having to lose a small percentage of margin. Sales are mostly about moving items, so they are already losing huge margins at that point anyway.

Anyway, you can always advertise 9.99 + tax and show the actual price with tax in the store tags.

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

#304
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

would you want your services to just turn off when a certain threshold is hit? If so, this problem is solved, set an alarm when cost hits X, use that alarm to trigger a Lambda to turn off the unwanted infra. AWS provides all the tools you need, you just need to use them.

Generally, using cost reporting directly doesn't work due to the delay in reporting of the costs.

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

#305
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…

> I suspect they're not getting a dedicated server from Amazon. If it's literally called a dedicated server, why would you suspect otherwise? Source: I worked in the core EC2 dataplane for a couple years. PEs and leadership there would not be happy with misleading customers. We constantly thought of the customer experience there.

I think you misread the comment you responded to.

It didn’t mean ”I suspect that what they are getting from Amazon isn’t a dedicated server”.

Rather it meant ”I suspect that they’re getting a dedicated server from somewhere else that isn’t Amazon”.

The original comment was talking about a dedicated machine for personal projects with a fixed cost of $40/month.

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

#306
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

would you want your services to just turn off when a certain threshold is hit? If so, this problem is solved, set an alarm when cost hits X, use that alarm to trigger a Lambda to turn off the unwanted infra. AWS provides all the tools you need, you just need to use them.

This problem should be solved with a simple form in the billing area, not a solution that probably requires upwards of 40h of work to set up and properly test to a level I would trust it with anything. Even then it's dependent on delayed cost reporting with unknown failure modes. It merely makes a best-effort at containing the costs and it doesn't actually limit them.

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

#307
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

would you want your services to just turn off when a certain threshold is hit? If so, this problem is solved, set an alarm when cost hits X, use that alarm to trigger a Lambda to turn off the unwanted infra. AWS provides all the tools you need, you just need to use them.

Yes, but I want this lambda to be written and run by Amazon. This was requested already in the first days ow AWS, they literally said they understand it is important for us and will work on it, and then stopped replying about this issue for many years, in spite of people asking for it and voting for it all the time. They know perfectly well what is going on and decided not to do it for business reasons.

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

#308
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. AWS Advance Pay.

I couldn't find a list of "eligible charges", also that doesn't seem to mean advance payment would be the only payment option so I couldn't be billed and the service would just stop.. did I miss anything?

No, you didn't miss anything the advance payment is just an additional feature but you still need to give in your CC details so they can charge you if you make a mistake. The usual course of action is to stress out and beg them to forgive you, which they sometimes do, and sometimes don't.

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

#309
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

We did a calculation in my previous company and it turned out even with the egregious egress costs it was way cheaper to host these huge workloads outside of AWS.

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

#310
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I'm not sure about that. We get paid well for working with (or around) public cloud complexity, but I bet many of us would gladly manage much simpler setups like the Hetzner Cloud.
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