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AWS EC2 General Price Cut

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Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#21

Post by koheripbal »

abtinf wrote: post #12
TechBro8615 wrote: post #7

Are they still extorting customers by price gouging bandwidth? Maybe one day I’ll wake up to news they’ve decided to charge for capacity instead of transfer.

> Are they still extorting customers... That is a contradiction in terms. According to the OED: Extort means to "obtain (something) by force, threats, or other unfair means." Customer means "a person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or business" Thus, extortion is a coercive relationship--we call the target of extortion a victim, not a customer. The relationship of a vendor and customer is vol…

It's nice to see that the increasing amount of hyperbole here isn't impacting everyone.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#22

Post by infogulch »

Hmm, given the uneven reductions between regions, I wonder if this is more of a move to balance (and increase) demand so that it more closely matches their supply. So then I guess the question is: why do they have excess supply?

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#23

Post by unexaminedlife »

I'm holding out for a better price on GPU instances (for parallel processing).

My 'back of the napkin' calculations indicate it would take very little time for it to pay for itself by purchasing your own NVIDIA GPU(s) and running them from a colo.

Especially if your requirements are for the instance(s) to run 24x7.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#24

Post by lawrenceyan »

infogulch wrote: post #22

Hmm, given the uneven reductions between regions, I wonder if this is more of a move to balance (and increase) demand so that it more closely matches their supply. So then I guess the question is: why do they have excess supply?

Competing cloud service providers gouging away at what used to be an AWS monopoly that unfortunately for Amazon, no longer exists.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#25

Post by gdulli »

abtinf wrote: post #12
TechBro8615 wrote: post #7

Are they still extorting customers by price gouging bandwidth? Maybe one day I’ll wake up to news they’ve decided to charge for capacity instead of transfer.

> Are they still extorting customers... That is a contradiction in terms. According to the OED: Extort means to "obtain (something) by force, threats, or other unfair means." Customer means "a person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or business" Thus, extortion is a coercive relationship--we call the target of extortion a victim, not a customer. The relationship of a vendor and customer is vol…

Terms are commonly used metaphorically to show the speaker considers a given situation to resemble that term qualitatively but not exactly. Very commonly. Like, it's practically fundamental to our communication.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#26

Post by saagarjha »

abtinf wrote: post #12
TechBro8615 wrote: post #7

Are they still extorting customers by price gouging bandwidth? Maybe one day I’ll wake up to news they’ve decided to charge for capacity instead of transfer.

> Are they still extorting customers... That is a contradiction in terms. According to the OED: Extort means to "obtain (something) by force, threats, or other unfair means." Customer means "a person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or business" Thus, extortion is a coercive relationship--we call the target of extortion a victim, not a customer. The relationship of a vendor and customer is vol…

You can coerce someone to be your customer.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#27

Post by abtinf »

koheripbal wrote: post #21
abtinf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are they still extorting customers... That is a contradiction in terms. According to the OED: Extort means to "obtain (something) by force, threats, or other unfair means." Customer means "a person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or business" Thus, extortion is a coercive relationship--we call the target of extortion a victim, not a customer. The relationship of a vendor and customer is vol…

It's nice to see that the increasing amount of hyperbole here isn't impacting everyone.

It's not just hyperbole, it's grossly unjust.

Amazon quite rightly charge a higher price for some portions of AWS--transparently, up front, with tools to assess usage and estimate fees beforehand--because they created a product that many organizations believe provides extraordinary value.

And for the sin of earning a profit through voluntary trade, a vocal minority of HN damns them every single time AWS is mentioned. Every time we let this evil behavior go unchallenged, all productive individuals are diminished.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#28

Post by ramraj07 »

unexaminedlife wrote: post #23

I'm holding out for a better price on GPU instances (for parallel processing). My 'back of the napkin' calculations indicate it would take very little time for it to pay for itself by purchasing your own NVIDIA GPU(s) and running them from a colo. Especially if your requirements are for the instance(s) to run 24x7.

Why would they ever be not the case ? If you ignore sysadmin costs AWS is always more expensive (even when reserved for three years) than any machine you maintain yourself

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#29

Post by dodobirdlord »

cyberferret wrote: post #11
hmk99 wrote: post #8

The price reduction for M5 in US East is just 2%. Wish it was something that was actually substantial.

Noticed that too. We just upgraded all our servers from M3 to M5 instances, but all in the us-east-1 region, so looks like we won't save a lot by purchasing more reserved instances. Noticed a huge 20% reduction in some other areas though...

The us-east-1 region is widely considered as the "default" region, and so it's where customers put resources when they don't have any particular reason to put it somewhere else. For that same reason, it's also where less-sophisticated customers are likely to run unreplicated workloads. It's also the oldest, and biggest, and home to the most different instance types and rack architectures. It makes life hard when your largest, oldest, weirdest, and most important region are all the same region, so AWS has been trying to nudge customers off of old instance types and out of us-east-1 with pricing changes for a long time.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#30

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

pmiller2 wrote: post #19
jgalt212 wrote: post #17

AWS and EC2 is probably a pretty good deal for high CPU, hi IO within the cloud, but very low IO egress. Monte Carlo simulations? PDE computations?

Wouldn't a lot of that stuff be better done on GPU instances, even at a higher per hour cost?

EC2 also has GPU instances, right? The p2/p3/g3/g4 series.
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