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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]

#121

Post by gizzlon »

aurareturn wrote: post #78
bjourne wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What prevents an EC2 instance from going down in exactly the same way? Other hosting providers offer automatic backup too - it's not an AWS exclusive feature.

Nothing. It's just that I'm not the one responsible to fix it at 3am.

So if you app enters a crash-loop and fails to start an AWS engineer comes in and fixes it? Because that has not been my experience..

The truth is that there's still a lot of things you have to handle, including cloud bugs and problems. And other problems you don't have to think about anymore, especially with fully managed, high-level PaaS- like services.

I ran a cloud backend service for a startup with users, using manged services, and we still had an on-call team. The cloud is not magic.

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

#122

Post by paranoidrobot »

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?

I'm saying that if you do want to compare two different platforms on performance, it should probably be done in consultation with someone who has worked with it before.

To use an analogy it's like someone who's never driven a car, and really only read some basic articles about vehicles deciding to test the performance of two random vehicles.

Maybe one of them does suck, and is overpriced - but you're not getting the full picture if you never figured out that you've been driving it in first gear the whole time.

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

#123

Post by whstl »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #111
whstl wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 secu…

AWS counts as managed servers with constant security monitoring. That's a huge difference to paying for a dedicated server where you're responsible for the installation and maintenance of the operating system and all software, intrusion detection and thread responses, and server monitoring. I am a Hetzner customer for my forthcoming small company in order to keep running costs low, but it's not as if companies using…

> AWS counts as managed servers with constant security monitoring. That's a huge difference to paying for a dedicated server where you're responsible for the installation and maintenance of the operating system and all software, intrusion detection and thread responses, and server monitoring.

This has absolutely nothing to do with "georedundancy" or "physical security" or "electricity".

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

#124

Post by nchmy »

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…

i made a similar comment on the video a week ago. It is an AWFUL analysis, in almost every way. Which is shocking, because its so easy to show that AWS is overpriced and underpowered.

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

#125

Post by wink »

tpxl wrote: post #117
wink wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every team I have worked on so far, if using AWS you had 50-100% of the developers with the knowledge and credentials (and usually the confidence) to troubleshoot/just fix it/replace it. Every team with dedicated hardware in a data center it was generally 1-2 people who would have fixed stuff quickly, no matter the size of the company (small ones, of course - so 10-50 devs). And that's with available replacement hard…

You said developers have the knowledge and credentials (and thus the work) of managing your infra, and a moment later basically asserted you're saving money on the salary for the sysadmin. This is the actual lie you got sold on. AWS isn't going to help you setup your security, you have to do it yourself. Previously a sysadmin would do this, now it's the devs. They aren't going to monitor your database performance. Pr…

Yes, please continue explaining the job I did in the past to me.

It doesn't change anything, especially as I did not blatantly argue cloud=good,hardware=bad. That is a completely different question.

My point is that given some circumstances, you need a lot less specialized deep knowledge if all your software just works[tm] on a certain level of the stack upwards. Everyone knows the top 1/3 of the stack and you pay for the bottom 2/3 part.

I didn't mean to say "let's replace a sysadmin with some AWS stuff", my point was "100k per year on AWS makes a lot of small companies run".

Also my experience was with having hardware in several DCs around the world, and we did not have people there (small company, but present in at least 4 countries) - so we had to pay for remote hands and the experience was mostly bad . Maybe my bosses chose bad DCs, or maybe I'd trust sysadmins at "product companies" more than those working as remote hands at a hoster...

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

#126

Post by esseph »

fragmede wrote: post #112
esseph wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If we assume that you're a human being that sleeps, say 8 hrs/day, and not an LLM, that leaves you with 16 hours of consciousness a day, for an uptime of 66%. That's upsidedown nines. You don't even crack one nine of uptime. If we assume you've a diet of meth and cocaine, and only sleep 2 hours a day, that still puts you at only like 92% uptime.

> If we assume that you're a human being

I'll have you know I am a cantaloupe, you insensitive clod!

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

#127

Post by paranoidrobot »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #71
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…

This comment comes across as someone who is either trying to flog AWS to customers or someone who has to justify a job that depends on AWS.

Well, you're entitled to your opinion.

For what it's worth - my day job does involve running a bunch of infrastructure on AWS. I know it's not good value, but that's the direction the organisation went long before I joined them.

Previous companies I worked for had their infrastructure hosted with the likes of Rackspace, Softlayer, and others. Every now and then someone from management would come back from an AWS conference saying how they'd been offered $megabucks in AWS Credit if only we'd sign an agreement to move over. We'd re-run the numbers on what our infrastructure would cost on AWS and send it back - and that would stop the questions dead every time.

So, I'm not exactly tied to doing it one way or another.

I do still think though that if you're going to do a comparison on price and performance between two things, you should at least be somewhat experienced with them first, OR involve someone who is.

The author spun up an ECS cluster and then is talking about being unsure of how it works. It's still not clear whether they spun up Fargate nodes or EC2 instances. There's talk of performance variations between runs. All of these things raise questions about their testing methodology.

So, yeah, AWS is over-priced and under-performing by comparison with just spinning up a machine on Hetzner.

But at least get some basics right. I don't think that's too much to ask.

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

#128

Post by paranoidrobot »

benterix wrote: post #91
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…

For an older but more to the point comparison, see this: https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...

I'm pretty sure this was posted on HN a while ago, and that I read it then.

It's good - makes it's point well.

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

#129

Post by kamaal »

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…

>>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.

If you are having a company that warrants building a data center, then AWS does not add much.

Other wise you face the 'if you want to build apple pie from scratch, you need to first invent the universe' problem. Simply put you can get started right on day one, in a pay as you go model. Like you can write code, deploy and ship from the very first day, instead of having to go deep down the infrastructure rabbit hole.

Plus shutting down things is easy as well. Things don't workout? Good news! You can shut down the infrastructure that very day instead of having to worry about the capital expenditure spent to build infrastructure, and without having to worry about its use later.

Simply put, AWS is infrastructure you can hire and fire at will.

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

#130

Post by paranoidrobot »

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…

> “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”

Agreed, there's definitely a heavy element of that to it.

But, at the risk of again being labelled as an AWS Shill - there's also other benefits.

If your organisation needs to deploy some kind of security/compliance tools to help with getting (say) SOC2 certification - then there's a bunch of tools out there to help with that. All you have to do then is plug them into your AWS organisation. They can run a whole bunch of automated policy checks to say you're complying with whatever audit requirements.

If you're self-hosting, or using Hetzner - well, you're going to spend a whole lot more time providing evidence to auditors.

Same goes with integrating with vendors.

Maybe you want someone to load/save data for you - no problems, create an AWS S3 bucket and hand them an AWS IAM Role and they can do that. No handing over of creds.

There's a bunch of semi-managed services where a vendor will spin up EC2 instances running their special software, but since it's running in your account - you get more control/visiblity into it. Again, hand over an AWS IAM Role and off you go.

It's the Slack of IAAS - it might not be the fastest, it's definitely not the cheapest, and you can roll your own for sure. But then you miss out on all these integrations that make life easier.

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