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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]

#81

Post by spwa4 »

whstl wrote: post #19
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.

The people cleaning and keeping the café warm are your Ops team. AWS is just an extremely expensive Lidl. EDIT: autocorrect typo, coffee to café

Exactly. The whole promise behind cloud was "you don't need an ops team". Now go check for yourself if that's true: go to your favorite jobs portal and search for AWS, or to include Azure and Github sysadmins search for "devops engineer". And for laughs search for "IAM engineer", which is a job only about managing permissions for users (not deciding about permissions, JUST managing them and fixing problems, nothing more. And frankly, the cloud is to blame: figuring out correct permissions now requires teams of PhDs to do correctly on infuriating web interfaces. I used to think Active Directory permissions were bad. I was wrong. The job portals show: no corporate department should ever go without a team of IAM engineers who are totally not really sysadmins)

What do you get for this? A redundant database without support (because while AWS support really tries so hard to help that I feel bad saying this, they don't get time to debug stuff, and redundant databases are complicated whether or not you use the cloud). You also get S3 distributed storage, and serverless (which is kind of CGI, except using docker and AWS markups to make one of most efficient stateless ways to run code on the web really expensive). Btw: for all of these better open source versions are available as a helm chart, with effectively the same amount of support.

You can use vercel to get out from under this, but that only works for small companies' "I need a small website" needs. It cannot do the integration that any even medium sized company requires.

Oh, and you get Amazon TLA, which is another brilliant amazon invention: during the time it takes you to write a devops script Amazon TLA comes up with another three-letter AWS service that you now have to use, because one of the devs wants it on his resume, is 2x as expensive as anything else, doesn't solve any problem and you now have to learn. It's all about using AI for maximizing uselessness.

And you'll do all this on Amazon's patented 1994-styled webpages because even claude code doesn't understand the AWS CLI. And the GCP and Azure ones are somehow worse (their websites look a lot nicer though, I'll readily admit that. But they're not significantly more functional)

Conclusion: while cloud has changed the job of sysadmin somewhat, there is no real difference, other than a massive price increase. Cloud is now so expensive that, for a single month's cloud services, you can buy hardware and put it on your desk. As the youtube points out, even an 8GB M1 mac mini, even a chinese mini-pc with AMD, runs docker far better than the (now reduced to 2GB memory) standard cloud images.

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

#82

Post by jmaker »

remus wrote: post #46
jmaker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely. I believe what I wanted to convey is that there are trade-offs in every decision that you can make. Maybe that’s even the point of a decision in the first place.

This in turn means that you always have several options, and more importantly you can invent a new way to enjoy the experience you hope to get from that interaction at a café in your mind, maybe a scene from your past or from a movie, which you’re no longer as likely to experience on average.

That said, I’ve got a favorite café where I used to spend time frequently. But their service deteriorated. And the magic is gone. So I moved on with my expectations.

Back to the analogy with the hyperscalers. I had bad experience with Azure and GCP, I’ve experienced the trade-offs of DigitalOcean and Linode and Hetzner, and of running on-premises clusters. It turned out, I’m the most comfortable with the trade-offs that AWS imposes.

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

#83

Post by jfim »

Pooge wrote: post #60
paranoidrobot wrote: post #36

I'm struggling to find a way to express my opinion about this video without seeming like a complete ass. If the author's point was to make a low effort "ha ha AWS sucks" video, well sure: success, I guess. Nobody outside of AWS sales is going to say AWS is cheaper. But comparing the lowest end instances, and apparently, using ECS without seeming to understand how they're configuring or using it just makes their point…

What is the point you are trying to make? Are you saying that we would need to have someone on payroll to have a usable machine? Then why not just have... a SysAdmin? Shared instances is something even European "cloud" providers can do so why is EC2 so much more expensive and slower?

Because people aren't going on AWS for EC2, they go on it to have access to RDS, S3, EKS, ELB, SNS, Cognito, etc. Large enough customers also don't pay list price for AWS.

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

#84

Post by Ekaros »

baxtr wrote: post #27
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.

Good example. I also like the "why does a bottle of water cost $5 after security at airports" example. You have no choice. You’re locked in and can’t get out. Maybe that’s the better analogy?

Also. Your company is paying. You are not.

So for enough people the price is not an issue. Someone else is paying.

On other side. People are pretty bad at this sort of cost analysis. I fall on this issue, prefer to spend more time myself on something I should just recommend to buy.

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

#86

Post by Meekro »

When you're a solo SaaS developer/company owner, the dedicated server option really shines. I get a 10x lower price and no downsides that I've ever seen.

"But are your database backups okay?" Yeah, I coded the backup.sh script and confirmed that it works. The daily job will kick up a warning if it ever fails to run.

"But don't you need to learn Linux stuff to configure it?" Yeah, but I already know that stuff, and even if I didn't, it's probably easier to learn than AWS's interfaces.

"But what if it breaks and you have to debug it?" Good luck debugging an AWS lambda job that won't run or something; your own hardware is way more transparent than someone else's cloud.

"But don't you need reproducible configurations checked into git?" I have a setup.sh script that starts with a vanilla Ubuntu LTS box, and transforms it into a fully-working setup with everything deployed. That's the reproducible config. When it's time to upgrade to the next LTS release (every 4 years or so), I just provision a new machine and run that script again. It'll probably fail on first try because some ubuntu package name changed slightly, but that's a 5-minute fix.

"But what about scaling?" One of my crazy-fast dedicated machines is equal to ~10 of your slow-ass VPSes. If my product is so successful that this isn't enough, that's a good problem to have. Maybe a second dedicated machine, plus a load balancer, would be enough? If my product gets so popular that I'm thinking about hundreds of dedicated machines, then hopefully I have a team to help me with that.

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

#87

Post by whstl »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #47

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 wage…

> you need to have two servers on two locations for georedundancy

You also absolutely need this with EC2 instances, which is what the comparison was about. So no, it's not unfair.

If you're using an AWS service built on top of EC2, Fargate, or anything else, you WILL see the same costs (on top of the extremely expensive Ops engineer you hire to do it, of course).

> need to pay for the premises and their physical security, too [...] plus the electricity bill

...and all of this is included in the Hetzner service.

Once again comments conflating "dedicated server" with "co-location".

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

#88

Post by tiew9Vii »

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 $…

> 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 when you need to post on Hackernews to get support from your cloud provider as locked out of your account, being ignored and the only way to get access is try to create as much noise as possible it gets spotted.

Or your cloud provider wipes your account and you are a $135B pension fund [1]

Or your cloud portfolio is so big you need a "platform" team of multiple devops/developer staff to build wrappers around/package up your cloud provider for you and your platform team is now the bottleneck.

Cloud is useful but it's not as pain free as everyone says when comparing with managing your own, it still costs money and work. Having worked on several cloud transformations they've all cost more and taken more effort than expected. A large proportion have also been canned/postponed/re-evaluated due to cost/size/time/complexity.

Unless you are a big spender with dedicated technical account manager, your support is likely to be as bad as a no name budget VPS provider.

Both cloud and traditional hosting have their merits and place.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-acciden...

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

#89

Post by whstl »

refulgentis wrote: post #35
whstl wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this discussion is that a lot of people on these threads work as overpaid assistants to the one private chef, but also have never cooked at home. Translating: A lot of people work with AWS, are making bank, and are terrified of their skill set being made obsolete. They also have no idea what it means to use a dedicated server. That’s why we get the same tired arguments and assumptions (such as the be…

One of the least insightful comments I’ve seen in my 16 years here. “it’s because everyone here is dumb and knows it, and they are panicking and lying because they don’t want you to blow up their scam.”

I'm not calling anyone dumb. It is fine to not have experience with Hetzner or to have only with AWS. It's fine for someone to not know how to cook at home.

About people who work with it, I'm just alluding to the famous quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".

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

#90

Post by oersted »

aurareturn wrote: post #74
oersted wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After 8 years operating like this, I have had approximately the same number of critical outages in standard Cloud as with these providers. One included a whole OVH building burning down with our server in it, and recovery was faster than the recent AWS and Cloudflare outages. We felt less impotent and we could do more to mitigate the situation. If you want to, these providers also offer VMs, object storage and other…

I'm a geek and I like to tinker with hardware. I want to maximum my $/hardware and have built a ton of DIY computers myself since I was young. I'm all about getting the most hardware for the money. But I'd like to sleep at night and the cost of AWS is not a significant issue to the business.

That’s fair enough but that’s a luxury position, if costs are not concern to you then there’s not much point in discussing the merits of different methods to manage infrastructure efficiently.

And yes of course such costs are nothing if you are thinking of $300K just on a couple sysadmins. But this is just a bizarre bubble in a handful of small areas in the US and I am not sure how it can stay like that for much longer in this era of remote work.

We built a whole business with $100K in seed and a few government grants. I have worked with quite a few world-class senior engineers happily making 40K-70K.

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