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AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

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Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#41

Post by hhh »

parchley wrote: post #31
mgaunard wrote: post #26

Pricing in AWS is heavily dependent on whether you reserve the instance and for how long. In my experience, if you reserve a bare metal instance for 3 years (which is the biggest discount), it costs 2 times the price of buying it outright. I'm surprised to hear about the numbers from the video being way different, but then, it's a video, so I didn't watch it and can't tell if he did use the correct pricing.

You seem to insinuate that the correct pricing is using a 3 year commitment. That seems very much not logical to me considering the original promise of the cloud to be flexible, and to scale up and down on demand.

Should you be designing for a single server to exist for 3 years when you have such elastic compute? Why not design for living on spot instances and get savings lower than hetzner with better performance? What about floating savings plans? There’s a ton left on the table here just to say ‘aws bad’ for some views

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#42

Post by continuational »

mgaunard wrote: post #32
oersted wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a CTO of a number of small startups, I am still struggling to understand what exactly AWS and other cloud providers give you to justify the markup. And yes we’ve been heavy users of both AWS and Google Cloud for years, mainly because of the credits they initially provided, but also used VMs, dedicated servers and other services from Hetzner and OVH extensively. In my experience, in terms of availability and securi…

What AWS gives you is the ability to spin up dozens if not thousands of hosts in a single click. If you run your own hardware, getting stuff shipped to a datacenter and installed is 2 to 4 weeks (and potentially much longer based on how efficient your pipeline is)

But on Hetzner, you can usually get a dedicated server installed and ready tomorrow.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#43

Post by esseph »

aurareturn wrote: post #34
oersted wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a CTO of a number of small startups, I am still struggling to understand what exactly AWS and other cloud providers give you to justify the markup. And yes we’ve been heavy users of both AWS and Google Cloud for years, mainly because of the credits they initially provided, but also used VMs, dedicated servers and other services from Hetzner and OVH extensively. In my experience, in terms of availability and securi…

When your cheap dedicated server goes down and your admin is on holiday and you have hundreds of angry customers calling you, you'll get it. Or you need to restore your Postgres database and you find out that the backups didn't work. And finally you have a brilliant idea of hiring a second $150k/year dev ops admin so that at least one is always working and they can check each other's work. Suddenly, you're spending $…

Sure, but AWS has more downtime than I do :-)

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#44

Post by grey-area »

aurareturn wrote: post #34
oersted wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a CTO of a number of small startups, I am still struggling to understand what exactly AWS and other cloud providers give you to justify the markup. And yes we’ve been heavy users of both AWS and Google Cloud for years, mainly because of the credits they initially provided, but also used VMs, dedicated servers and other services from Hetzner and OVH extensively. In my experience, in terms of availability and securi…

When your cheap dedicated server goes down and your admin is on holiday and you have hundreds of angry customers calling you, you'll get it. Or you need to restore your Postgres database and you find out that the backups didn't work. And finally you have a brilliant idea of hiring a second $150k/year dev ops admin so that at least one is always working and they can check each other's work. Suddenly, you're spending $…

It is statistically far more likely that your cloud service will go down for hours or days, and you will have no recourse and will just have to wait till AWS manage to resolve it.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#45

Post by Perz1val »

aurareturn wrote: post #34
oersted wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a CTO of a number of small startups, I am still struggling to understand what exactly AWS and other cloud providers give you to justify the markup. And yes we’ve been heavy users of both AWS and Google Cloud for years, mainly because of the credits they initially provided, but also used VMs, dedicated servers and other services from Hetzner and OVH extensively. In my experience, in terms of availability and securi…

When your cheap dedicated server goes down and your admin is on holiday and you have hundreds of angry customers calling you, you'll get it. Or you need to restore your Postgres database and you find out that the backups didn't work. And finally you have a brilliant idea of hiring a second $150k/year dev ops admin so that at least one is always working and they can check each other's work. Suddenly, you're spending $…

That's even worse when AWS goes down and myth of it never going down should be more than shattered by now

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#46

Post by remus »

jmaker wrote: post #30
flibble wrote: post #10

I do like watching these comparisons however it reminds me of a conversation I had recently with my 10 year old. Son: Why does the croissant cost €2.80 here while it's only €0.45 in Lidl? Who would buy that? Me: You're not paying for the croissant, you're paying for the staff to give it to you, for the warm café, for the tables to be cleaned and for the seat to sit on.

More often than not, I’d rather avoid the self-focused staff who rarely give it to you with hygiene in mind and at this time of the year in the northern hemisphere are likely to be sick, the mediocre coffee (price surge in coffee beans), and the dirty tables at a café, and the uncomfortable seating. And it’s rather 5€ for the croissant alone, in many places these days. Lidl’s croissants aren’t very good but they’re o…

Me too, but it's worth remembering that's not the case for everyone. Some people want to have a little chat with the person at the counter, sit down for 5 mins in the corner of the cafe and eat their croissant. 5 euro can be a good price if that's what you want, and it doesn't matter if the lidl croissant is free, it will still be disappointing to the person who wants the extras.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#47

Post by jonathanstrange »

This is always an unfair comparison because for any realistic comparison you need to have two servers on two locations for georedundancy and need to pay for the premises and their physical security, too. For example, you need to pay for security locks with access log and a commercial security company, or you have to pay for co-location in a datacenter.

When you add up all these costs plus the electricity bill, I wager that many cloud providers are on the cheaper side due to the economy of scale. I'd be interested in such a more detailed comparison for various locations / setups vs cloud providers.

What almost never goes into this discussion, however, is the expertise and infrastructure you lose when you put your servers into the cloud. Your own servers and their infrastructure are MOAT that can be sold as various products if needed. In contrast, relying on a cloud provider is mostly an additional dependency.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#48

Post by tempestn »

danpalmer wrote: post #3

S3 is also 10x more expensive than this single consumer grade second hand hard drive I have. Managed NAT gateways are also 10000x more expensive than my router. This is a boring argument that has been done to death.

There's a distinction between just saying it's more expensive and saying it's slower at the same price. Compared to well spec'ed and administered dedicated servers, it's basically impossible to get the same performance from AWS (or other cloud services) at any price. Yes, there are advantages, scaling being the greatest one. But you won't get the same raw speed you can achieve with fast storage and processing in a single machine (or a tight network) through cloud services—probably at all, but certainly not for anywhere near the same price.

And if you are willing to pay, you can significantly over-provision dedicated servers, solving much of the scaling problem as well.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#49

Post by peanut-walrus »

oersted wrote: post #24
danpalmer wrote: post #3

S3 is also 10x more expensive than this single consumer grade second hand hard drive I have. Managed NAT gateways are also 10000x more expensive than my router. This is a boring argument that has been done to death.

As a CTO of a number of small startups, I am still struggling to understand what exactly AWS and other cloud providers give you to justify the markup. And yes we’ve been heavy users of both AWS and Google Cloud for years, mainly because of the credits they initially provided, but also used VMs, dedicated servers and other services from Hetzner and OVH extensively. In my experience, in terms of availability and securi…

It makes sense to think about price in the context of your business. If your entire infra cost is a rounding error on your balance sheet, of course you would pick the provider with the best features and availability guarantees (choose IBM/AWS). If your infra cost makes up a significant percentage of your operating expenses, you will start spending engineering effort to lower the cost.

That's why AWS can get away with charging the prices they do, even though it is expensive, for most companies it is not expensive enough to make it worth their while to look for cheaper alternatives.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#50

Post by mgaunard »

parchley wrote: post #31
mgaunard wrote: post #26

Pricing in AWS is heavily dependent on whether you reserve the instance and for how long. In my experience, if you reserve a bare metal instance for 3 years (which is the biggest discount), it costs 2 times the price of buying it outright. I'm surprised to hear about the numbers from the video being way different, but then, it's a video, so I didn't watch it and can't tell if he did use the correct pricing.

You seem to insinuate that the correct pricing is using a 3 year commitment. That seems very much not logical to me considering the original promise of the cloud to be flexible, and to scale up and down on demand.

Elasticity is very expensive, in practice people only use it for one-off jobs, preferably using the cheaper unreliable "spot" instances (meaning the job must support being partially re-run to recover, which implies a complex job splitting and batching platform).

For traditional, always-on servers, you should reserve them for 3 years. You still have the ability to scale up, just not down. You can always go hybrid if you don't know what your baseline usage is.

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