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AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

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Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#141

Post by usmannk »

jstream67 wrote: post #109
usmannk wrote: post #14

Network Egress always gets a bad rap but recently it's the SSD cost on AWS/GCP that has me upset. IMO storage needs to take on some of network egress's heat :) $0.10 per GB-month for a basic SSD is outrageous compared to Hetzner et. al. a 4TB SSD for a month costs $400 on the big guys and like $50 on the commodity providers. It's not even a managed service!

I've always been bad at math but isn't 4TB for $400 approximately $0.10/GB ? As another commenter mentioned EBS is quite a bit better than just a SSD in a number of ways. You can resize it, it has published resiliency numbers, quick and easy snapshots, etc etc Also worth noting that the newest generation (GP3) is 0.08/GB/Month although like all things Amazon there are other charges to take into account.

> I’ve always been bad at math but isn't 4TB for $400 approximately $0.10/GB?

Yes, I was trying to say that amazon and google charge $400 for 4TB (a lot!). And yes, EBS is better but what about when all you need is actually just an SSD?

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#142

Post by Nathanba »

hcazz wrote: post #7
Nathanba wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be cheap now but there is absolutely no guarantee that one day they'll send out a fairly nondescriptive AGB update email and increase the prices without you knowing. Then because all these ever so helpful cloud services don't allow you to create payment caps the costs can explode any day. It's all one executive decision away.

Historically speaking, in the ~15 years AWS has been around, have they ever increased prices for any service? In my experience, they've only ever decreased prices of their services as advances in tech have been made rather than increasing them. Sure some start out being expensive cough Macie and Fargate cough but they didn't increase prices after being launched as far as I'm aware. Assuming they never have increased…

The fact that they don't have a simple price cap setting proves to me that they have no intention of being on my side. Promises of businesses that they won't increase prices are .. well, it just means almost nothing to me. It's "nice".

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#143

Post by Dylan16807 »

thrtythreeforty wrote: post #110
Dylan16807 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

B2 is definitely a lower tier of storage and I don't begrudge amazon wanting $23 for their top tier. But the bandwidth is a huge issue.

In what sense? The durability is 11 9s either way [1]. If you value all the different AWS regions, then it's true that B2 can't match that. I'd still argue the 4.6x cost difference isn't worth that for a lot of uses, though. [1]: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/218485257-B2-Re...

The data is only stored in one data center, and the 99.9 and 99.99 percentile latency on requests is not good and can cause issues depending on use case.

And if durability is your main concern you'd be on a cheaper S3 plan anyway.

> I'd still argue the 4.6x cost difference isn't worth that for a lot of uses, though.

Sure. S3 and B2 have different strengths, and B2 is better for many uses. But looking at the full stack and the performance at each layer suggests to me that S3 charges a reasonable/fair price for storage. And that's what the question was about.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#144

Post by krab »

Slartie wrote: post #48
lbriner wrote: post #42

The complaints about cloud costs vs on-prem often compare apples with pears. Complaining that a machine that "I could buy for $1000" costs like $4000/year on cloud missing an enormous number of costs that people don't consider as well as the reliability/availability that you are paying for. Do it the same on-prem and you need to include the costs for: * An air-conditioned room + maintenance (this could be very large…

The complaints about the complaints about cloud costs vs on-prem often deliberately ignore that there is a spectrum of options between "cloud" and "on-prem". This is not a binary choice between these two extremes. Your air-conditioned room plus networking can easily be rented from a multitude of providers, for example, in different variants from "el cheapo" to "ultra-high-professional with lots of fancy certificates"…

Our colo even offers managed Kubernetes on top of the rented hardware.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#145

Post by AtlasBarfed »

rmbyrro wrote: post #102
tommek4077 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original machine has a base-plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzelvanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-delta type placed in pane…

Not really sure this adheres to HN guidelines [1]. What's the substance here? What respectful idea are you adding to the discussion? Maybe this kind of comment would fit better a Facebook group? If you like this community and benefit from "thoughtful" and "substantive" ideas shared here, I'd suggest reading these guidelines. They are meant to avoid HN from descending to shallowness and disrespect, like many other com…

I think this is the line that triggered the parent:

"Cloudfront can distribute static content and backends running on Lambda@Edge."

The really scary thing is that the aws products being lampooned are the mainstream ones. Amazon has, what, another couple hundred "offerings"?

Here on HN, there are people that say if you're using AWS only for the basic EC2 you're doing it wrong. They can be correct in the tactical sense, but in the strategic sense, AWS is cackling with glee.

If I were building an IT org, I'd have an Infra as code foundation that from the foundation supported both AWS and other options that are far cheaper. AWS for prototyping and DR/redundancy but it "seamlessly" (I can hear the eyeballs roll and you're all not wrong) will deploy to non-AWS.

It's crazy that the basic tooling for EC2 / google computer / azure / etc to do this is only at the quarter-state. Hey HN, isn't there a massive opportunity for a company to meta-manage this?

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#146

Post by WatchDog »

philliphaydon wrote: post #121
bombcar wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to simulate an AZ failing, and when it does, half the internet goes offline, so people don't really complain that much .

About 5 or 6 years ago we had an alert in the middle of the night that our RDS instance dieded. It failed over in about 15 seconds (SQL Server so it’s a bit slow compared to PostgreSQL) but the MultiAZ worked as advertised. The downside is AWS never told us why it occurred.

I’ve seen a few AWS instance hardware failures, they happen with some regularity. You can handle single instance failure without being multi AZ. Testing an actual AZ failure, as in the whole AZ going offline or getting partitioned from the other AZs, is pretty much impossible.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#147

Post by Bellamy »

matwood wrote: post #87
Bellamy wrote: post #41

AWS is overrated. Most of the engineers and managers choose it because it's a safe choice for them. But in the long term the costs rise and you can't get away from it. I would even argue it's only for those who are afraid of command line.

> I would even argue it's only for those who are afraid of command line. This make no sense. Using AWS beyond spinning up a VM requires extensive knowledge and comfort at the 'command line'. In fact, I think the vast knowledge required is one of the negatives of all the current cloud providers. Back when I could walk down the hall into the DC and sit down at whatever machine it was easier , and arguably required less…

So you could easily switch away from AWS if needed?

I've heard a few horror stories of vendor locking and I can easily understand that (but no own experience, luckily).

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#148

Post by fulafel »

moduspol wrote: post #33
fulafel wrote: post #4

It's interesting how AWS can keep so high prices on these. But it's just the beginning, the real money comes from when they convince you to run over a dozen vms/containers (all needing storage etc of course). You need to be triply redundant on 3 availability zones, (3x) both with the RDS db cluster and app containers (2x) . And then have separate dev/staging/prod envs (3x). That's 18x. You can then get a pat on the h…

This seems overwhelmingly pessimistic. VMs, serverless, and Kubernetes all panned without a suggestion of an alternative. The theme is knocking on AWS, so is your suggestion to go back to colos and self-hosting? Does that really sound better than infra-as-code?

I didn't knock on VMs or infra as code generally, or suggest you go all the way to self hosting. Doing IaC of course is orthogonal to AWS. Your best alternatives depend on your needs. It might be some higher level app platform too, like various current Heroku style platforms etc. Just know what you're getting into.

Re: AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

#150

Post by jb_s »

nindalf wrote: post #19
faangiq wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t be silly. It’s a game theoretic certainty that they will indeed pull an Oracle.

There's no need to act condescending or call people names ("silly"). A 15 year track record and a public commitment aren't things you can hand wave away. I'd also point out there's no substance behind your "game theoretic" jargon.

The parent put it too strongly but it's equally naive to assume that track records and public commitments mean anything to a privately-held company, with a commitment to profit shareholders, run by Jeff Bezos.
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