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AWS EC2 General Price Cut

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Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#81

Post by oh_sigh »

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.

AWS bandwidth fees make a multi-cloud infra a less likely design or migration choice by their customers, leading to lock-in.

> Service providers may attempt to “lock in” customers to prevent them from switching to alternative products, technologies, or suppliers. Customer lock-in involves raising customers’ switching costs to the point that the cost of switching outweighs the potential benefits from switching.

http://www.ictregulationtoolkit.org/toolkit/2.2.3.6

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#82

Post by ateevchopra »

I'm wondering if this is to support small businesses/startups in the light of Covid19. I know they amazon and google are already giving covid19 discounts to companies but that won't cut it. I personally know so many startups who are looking at their huge server bills and won't be able to survive for long if that pricing continues. A failed startup is just one less customer for cloud companies. So could this new pricing be to to keep existing small/medium customers ? Just a thought. What do you guys are experiencing around ?

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#83

Post by rumanator »

tanilama wrote: post #77
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.

With AWS you also pay for much more than just hardware.

Even when compared with other cloud providers, AWS is super expensive.

The only interesting service that AWS provides is the ability to host your services globally through multiple availability zones, but unless you need to provide a global service with low latency everywhere in the globe then that's just not worth the time and money.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#84

Post by jpalomaki »

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.

Check the prices for example on Hezner or some other company which provides dedicated boxes. They are totally different from big cloud. Like 6 cores and 256GB memory for 150€/month (one older server I have there).

Of course these don’t scale dynamically. And you don’t just create copied of the servers. And they don’t have 100 security certifications like Azure/AWS. And no data centers in every jurisdiction.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#85

Post by tanilama »

rumanator wrote: post #83
tanilama wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS is so much more than just hardware It is called service for a reason.

With AWS you also pay for much more than just hardware. Even when compared with other cloud providers, AWS is super expensive. The only interesting service that AWS provides is the ability to host your services globally through multiple availability zones, but unless you need to provide a global service with low latency everywhere in the globe then that's just not worth the time and money.

> Even when compared with other cloud providers, AWS is super expensive.

Well this is not true. I don't think Azure is much cheaper in that regard. In reality, the big clouds are watching each other very closely. Do you have data other than anecdote evidence?

Also if you are big enough, you can negotiate better deal with AWS separately, and I believe that is the norm.

Disclaimer: I worked at AWS before.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#86

Post by phamilton »

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.

Could someone a little more familiar with buying their own hardware tell me how much hardware equivalent to a c5.12xlarge (48 cores, 96 GB) would cost?

Spot prices are around $0.80/hr, which puts total compute cost at $7k/yr.

On demand is $2.04/hr ($17k/yr), reserved is 1.20/hr ($10k/yr).

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#87

Post by gazoakley »

neurostimulant wrote: post #74
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.

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.

Not true (unfortunately). Transfer within an AZ is free, but go outside that and the pricing is a minefield:

https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1172239124251709449?s=1...

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#88

Post by rumanator »

tanilama wrote: post #85
rumanator wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With AWS you also pay for much more than just hardware. Even when compared with other cloud providers, AWS is super expensive. The only interesting service that AWS provides is the ability to host your services globally through multiple availability zones, but unless you need to provide a global service with low latency everywhere in the globe then that's just not worth the time and money.

> Even when compared with other cloud providers, AWS is super expensive. Well this is not true. I don't think Azure is much cheaper in that regard. In reality, the big clouds are watching each other very closely. Do you have data other than anecdote evidence? Also if you are big enough, you can negotiate better deal with AWS separately, and I believe that is the norm. Disclaimer: I worked at AWS before.

> Do you have data other than anecdote evidence?

Why, yes. Take Hetzner for example. With their Hetzner cloud offering you get, say, 1vCPU with 2GB of RAM and 2TB of traffic for 3€/month. For an instance with 2vCPUs yo pay about 4.15€.

For an equivalent EC2 instance (t3.small) you pay about 5x the price, and you still need to pay additional costs such as egress charges.

Heck, with Hetzner you can spend less than 50€/month and get a dedicated box with 64GB of RAM and 4 real cores with free unlimited traffic over a dedicated 1Gb connection.

It isn't even up for debate: AWS price-gouges their customers. Unless you have a very particular need to deploy an application globally, it's very hard to defend paying AWS's cost.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#89

Post by latch »

phamilton wrote: post #86
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.

Could someone a little more familiar with buying their own hardware tell me how much hardware equivalent to a c5.12xlarge (48 cores, 96 GB) would cost? Spot prices are around $0.80/hr, which puts total compute cost at $7k/yr. On demand is $2.04/hr ($17k/yr), reserved is 1.20/hr ($10k/yr).

Not colocated, but in the US, you can find a dual EPYC 7742 (64 cores) with 512GB of ram (with ssds, hdds, and bandwidth included) for $1000/m.

This should absolutely demolish the c5.12xlarge, especially if you need any disk IO or bandwidth.

Or from a different provider, a Dual Epyc 7281 (32 cores) with 256GB (and ssds, hdds and bandwith included) for $400/m.

You can get cheaper if you're willing to host in Europe. And this is dedicated, so no additional power or storage or maintenance cost. Stuff breaks, they replace it. Also, your commitment is 1 month.

Re: AWS EC2 General Price Cut

#90

Post by gravypod »

phamilton wrote: post #86
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.

Could someone a little more familiar with buying their own hardware tell me how much hardware equivalent to a c5.12xlarge (48 cores, 96 GB) would cost? Spot prices are around $0.80/hr, which puts total compute cost at $7k/yr. On demand is $2.04/hr ($17k/yr), reserved is 1.20/hr ($10k/yr).

Current gen hardware is about 10-15k. If you buy used or legacy hardware (like what c5 runs on) you can get much more bang for buck.

Here's an eBay listing for 2 machines with similar CPU config for 400+shipping: https://www.ebay.com/itm/INTEL-COMPUTER-48-CORE-DUAL-XEON-24...

Buyer be wear but there are deals to be had. That said purchasing the hardware is step one. Setting up PXE, network storage, cluster mgmt, recycling and upgrade, etc is a full time job passed a specific scale.

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