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The cost of cloud

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Re: The cost of cloud

#81

Post by Aeolun »

throwaway91822 wrote: post #72
trabant00 wrote: post #40

I have a rule that is simple, effective but also quite rude: if you can't deliver and maintain a 500 instances large infrastructure, same uptime and all, at half the cost of AWS by yourself (1 person) in 3 months using only open source solutions basically you should not have an opinion about this. You are just rationalizing your incompetence on this particular subject. Sorry to be this blunt but I am simply tired of…

I maintained a datacenter with approx 1000 hypervisors with a very small team and took few weeks to start having production workloads. The effort to maintain hardware was quite little and it was hugely cheaper than any cloud service. Having said that, your requirement is pretty absurd. Billions of people choose to own and maintain houses and cars and cook their own food because it's cheaper than the alternatives. Nob…

> Nobody expects them to be professional mechanics or cooks.

To be fair, there’s also nobody that would listen to them over a professional mechanic or cook.

Re: The cost of cloud

#82

Post by CodesInChaos »

trabant00 wrote: post #40

I have a rule that is simple, effective but also quite rude: if you can't deliver and maintain a 500 instances large infrastructure, same uptime and all, at half the cost of AWS by yourself (1 person) in 3 months using only open source solutions basically you should not have an opinion about this. You are just rationalizing your incompetence on this particular subject. Sorry to be this blunt but I am simply tired of…

Assuming the 500 instances are something like m5.4xlarge, the on-demand cost would be $3M. You save something on reserved instances, but have other excessive costs like egress, so that should be the right order of magnitude.

So why do you limit a project that's supposed to save $1M+ to a cost of $50k or so?

Re: The cost of cloud

#83

Post by Thristle »

dijit wrote: post #61
initplus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even sure it's cheaper. At a previous employer we had approximately 150k of cloud expenses per annum. Bringing that in house would have eclipsed the cloud expenses on additional staffing costs alone.

What are you guys doing to have such a low cost? I have a small GKE cluster and a few databases and I’m well above that, I nearly hit that in a month! Maybe you don’t have read replicas of your databases? Do you take any traffic?

How much is small? In terms of cpu cores and memmory

Cost in cloud is all about capacity and each cloud has very good tools to see where the money is going. It sounds like either what you consider small is not that or money is being wasted somewhere on things you are not aware of

Re: The cost of cloud

#84

Post by dijit »

Thristle wrote: post #83
dijit wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you guys doing to have such a low cost? I have a small GKE cluster and a few databases and I’m well above that, I nearly hit that in a month! Maybe you don’t have read replicas of your databases? Do you take any traffic?

How much is small? In terms of cpu cores and memmory Cost in cloud is all about capacity and each cloud has very good tools to see where the money is going. It sounds like either what you consider small is not that or money is being wasted somewhere on things you are not aware of

I guess “small” is open for interpretation.

Let’s say 720vCPU for the cluster and about 2.3TiB of memory.

These would be quite small nodes if you bought them as machines in a datacenter. Most modern machines have 40+vCPU and 128G+ RAM each.

I have 36machines in my GKE nodepool with 20vCPU and 64G of ram. So the aggregate totals sound high but it’s not many. In terms of real machines I could have fewer, like 18 or so.

Re: The cost of cloud

#85

Post by CodesInChaos »

presentation wrote: post #58
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. As far as I can tell, the core value of AWS is letting accountant shift CAPEX to OPEX. The technical considerations are a distant second or third place.

I choose to host on Vercel because I can spin up a production-ready, globally distributed web app in about 5 minutes with marginal, predictable costs without hiring a single other person, procuring any hardware nor learning anything beyond what’s necessary for coding my application. Pair it with analogous services like Upstash and Fly.io for persistence, and you can achieve incredible scale with minimal operational b…

At a glance, Vercel's pricing looks unbelievably expensive. $550/TB traffic, and $60k/yr for a 128MB function running at 100% utilization. What's the point of scalability, if you can't afford it to scale above the size of a small vserver? I'd have nightmares about a small DDoS attack costing me millions running on infrastructure like that.

What does it offer compared to other serverless offerings (aws lambda, google cloud run) to justify this cost?

Re: The cost of cloud

#86

Post by sparkling »

I agree that 99% of companies should not be buying their own hardware and setting up a datacenter in their basements. But: not all clouds are created equal.

The "cloud" can just be a blank Debian box on Digitalocean where you have root access _or_ it could be some obscure managed AWS service where all the technical days are abstracted away behind a REST API.

Re: The cost of cloud

#87

Post by kaetemi »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #35
Clubber wrote: post #2

I'm sure people will disagree, but I've always viewed the main benefit of cloud is a company with no talent or time to do networking / infrastructure early on, so they use the cloud, which requires less expertise. Once they grow and can afford network / infrastructure talent, the switching costs are hard to justify, even with the 3x markup (according to the article). I can see why it's compelling, but for me running…

The issue is that the 3x cost doesn’t include the cost to staff the team that runs your in-house platform software on your colo setup, and the mixed incentives you get when a sizable part of your team is not shipping product but instead shipping say, Kafka queues. My previous employer has one of the largest colo deployments of the f500 companies and it was a mess technically and organizationally. At the end a few hun…

Rented dedicated feels like a nice middle ground between colo or on-site and cloud hosted. It's on the cheaper end. And if you can boot into a self-configuring image, maintenance cost is quite low too.

Re: The cost of cloud

#88

Post by southerntofu »

trabant00 wrote: post #51
csydas wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't consider this rude or blunt, but rather incomplete as I really am not sure what points are frustrating for you or what you would hope someone takes away from it -- I'm an outside observer on the cloud subject as I have seen huge debates over use of the public cloud internally at my company and also with client companies. I've seen the billing costs of the public cloud absolutely demolish an IT org's yearly bu…

When I'm frustrated I'm not exactly clear in my writing. You need to be able to do both options before having an opinion on which is appropriate in which case. I am suprised to have to state this. But in my experience people argue one option a lot without being to deliver the other. People who know bare metal are rare these days from the total of available infrastructure engineers (call them sysadmins, devops, etc).…

> People who know bare metal are rare these days from the total of available infrastructure engineers

Sysadmins are not rare they're just not the people you hear about in Silicon Valley bubble anymore. 90+% of businesses haven't moved to the "cloud" (i.e. whoever the fuck's computer you can't get your hands on in case of problems) and even if they wanted to it would make no sense: most businesses just need a basic website and an email/accounting service. Cloud abstractions provide much complexity and zero benefits for such usecases.

> But in my experience people argue one option a lot without being to deliver the other.

I'm in this box. I can't deliver "cloud" computing and from a political perspective i refuse to "learn". Also, it makes no sense for the non-profit projects i work with: the biggest ones need at most a few servers which is still manageable by hand and certainly easier to deal with via Ansible/Chef than via new layers of abstractions and all their new failure modes (eg k8s/AWS).

Re: The cost of cloud

#89

Post by pas »

nix23 wrote: post #75
dilyevsky wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which 500 instances? 500 ec2 “large” is like half of a rack… or is the point to engage opponent in unwinnable argument?

I think i can beat that argument pretty easy, 5 freebsd hosts with each 100 running jails...it's cheaper, uptime is something to discuss, but the data is not on someone elses computer. The real cost of cloud is that nearly anyone think it's impossible to setup a infra for yourself....loosing systemadmin as a role in companys probably the biggest loss.

Not "anyone", but probably most newcomers to the industry. Since they are simply not exposed to the non-cloud ways of setting up infra.

On ever AWS/cloud post here the first comment is usually rent dedicated boxes from Hetzner (or whomever) and you can cut your costs. (And especially now with k8s it is really really easy to have something sane on bare-ish metal.)

But at the same time what "cloud" gives to people is 20+ PoPs around the world. Basically giant hosting companies, with an endless list of bells and whistles.

Re: The cost of cloud

#90

Post by headsoup »

Aeolun wrote: post #79
trabant00 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I'm frustrated I'm not exactly clear in my writing. You need to be able to do both options before having an opinion on which is appropriate in which case. I am suprised to have to state this. But in my experience people argue one option a lot without being to deliver the other. People who know bare metal are rare these days from the total of available infrastructure engineers (call them sysadmins, devops, etc).…

There are few things we want to do on-premise any more. The main problem of on-premise, and benefit of cloud, is that we can add new capacity at a moments notice. You never have to wonder if you’ll need to add more capacity (with two month lead times) to provision a database. Now you could say that infra teams that do not anticipate such a need are less than ideal, and I’d agree with you, but I haven’t been part of t…

There are certainly companies like yours that are perhaps Web product driven and need flexible scalability, but there are many out there that have little requirements for such scaling, at least unexpectedly, which will run perfectly fine with on-premises virtualisation.

The poster above is right, both have their purpose, but those sold on cloud as the complete solution are kidding themselves in most cases, Happy to accept crazy cloud cost blow-outs above over-provisioning tin or thinking properly about the use-cases.

It honestly sounds like you don't care about efficiency because of either good inflows or a need to move extremely fast. Such is the appeal of cloud...

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