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AWS EC2 General Price Cut

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Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#71

Post by johntash »

chrisseaton wrote: post #50
reedwolf wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you mean. You can buy GPUs anywhere. You can even buy Tesla V100s that power AWS accelerated instances.

> Not sure what you mean. Over the last decade there was often a major problem in GPU supply. Huge users like Amazon were presumably buying in bulk direct from manufacturers as custom runs so weren’t trying to buy them on the open market like everyone else. Even other clouds had major problems getting them at some points.

There were lots of GPUs being bought up for crypto mining reasons, but that doesn't seem like it has been as big of a deal in the consumer market recently (at least locally.)

If anything, it generated a lot of cheap secondhand cards for sale in some places.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#72

Post by kilbuz »

rb808 wrote: post #66

Buying your own Physical hardware is so cheap now its crazy. A commodity Ryzen 16 vCPU box is about the same price as 2 months rent on EC2. I get maintenance, electricity and bandwidth isn't free but I honestly thought cloud server prices would be much lower by now. No wonder AWS is making huge profits.

For me, not having to worry about the "where" and "how" related to physical placement and connection of that Ryzen box is worth the premium and then some.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#73

Post by sudosysgen »

nickff wrote: post #70
User23 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought anticompetitive behavior was the exact opposite of price gouging. You sell below cost to put your competitors out of business. Evidently AWS isn't doing that with bandwidth.

If you price lower than your competitors it is anti-competitive dumping. If you price higher than your competitors, it is monopolistic gouging. If you price the same as your competitors, it is price-fixing. No matter what price someone selects, they are guilty of something.

Well no, it's only gouging if you're running at a loss. If you're not running a loss and pricing lower than your competitors that's just fine.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#74

Post by neurostimulant »

User23 wrote: post #62
sixdimensional wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I do genuinely wonder if some day this will be seen as anticompetitive behavior (a form of lock-in via higher than reasonable egress fees).

I thought anticompetitive behavior was the exact opposite of price gouging. You sell below cost to put your competitors out of business. Evidently AWS isn't doing that with bandwidth.

Egress is expensive, therefore you're less likely to use other cheaper cloud vendors to host some part of your infra and keep everything inside aws network (as internal aws bandwidth is free even halfway across the world). Also if you have huge amount of data, moving them out of aws into another cloud would net you a hefty bandwidth bills so you're less likely to consider moving.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#75

Post by sudosysgen »

pests wrote: post #51
TechBro8615 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, are you saying it’s grossly unjust to criticize the pricing of Amazon’s cloud product? Just to be clear: Amazon is not paying a variable cost for how many bits are transferred over their wires. And the standard, prior to cloud, and still in colocation, was to charge for capacity (i.e. $/gbps) rather than transfer (i.e $/gb). They are making massive, massive profits by this pricing arrangement. The cost of susta…

"[...]disconnected from any actual cost basis[...]" Not everything is priced based on the cost of it's inputs. In this case it seems to be what the market will bear.

Which in this case is exorbitant and is something that we should oppose. Pricing as much as the market will bear is not good for consumers, and in some cases is a red-mark of market failure (not in this one, as of yet).

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#76

Post by latch »

kilbuz wrote: post #72
rb808 wrote: post #66

Buying your own Physical hardware is so cheap now its crazy. A commodity Ryzen 16 vCPU box is about the same price as 2 months rent on EC2. I get maintenance, electricity and bandwidth isn't free but I honestly thought cloud server prices would be much lower by now. No wonder AWS is making huge profits.

For me, not having to worry about the "where" and "how" related to physical placement and connection of that Ryzen box is worth the premium and then some.

Then use a dedicated provider. You won't save as much, but in raw costs, you'll be about 2x ahead and in cost/performance you'll be 4x-8x (much more if you're a heavy bandwidth user, and much much more if proper hardware lets you scale vertically rather than prematurely having to scale horizontally).

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#77

Post by tanilama »

rb808 wrote: post #66

Buying your own Physical hardware is so cheap now its crazy. A commodity Ryzen 16 vCPU box is about the same price as 2 months rent on EC2. I get maintenance, electricity and bandwidth isn't free but I honestly thought cloud server prices would be much lower by now. No wonder AWS is making huge profits.

AWS is so much more than just hardware

It is called service for a reason.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#79

Post by sudosysgen »

chrisseaton wrote: post #50
reedwolf wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you mean. You can buy GPUs anywhere. You can even buy Tesla V100s that power AWS accelerated instances.

> Not sure what you mean. Over the last decade there was often a major problem in GPU supply. Huge users like Amazon were presumably buying in bulk direct from manufacturers as custom runs so weren’t trying to buy them on the open market like everyone else. Even other clouds had major problems getting them at some points.

There was never a real issue getting 4 or 5 commodity-grade GPUs. At worst, you had to pay a 20-30% premium.
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