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Effectively using AWS Reserved Instances

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Re: Effectively using AWS Reserved Instances

#91

Post by not_kurt_godel »

kakwa_ wrote: post #89
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't start a conversation with an opening generalization like that if you want something constructive. Especially when the rest of your post is clearly based on the single anecdote of your experience. You are doing as much, if not more generalization by way of the assumptions you're making. > >Running your own hardware is AWFUL. > Maybe for you. Not for any sysadmin with even just a couple of years of experience.…

> How many organizations have the millions of dollars of capex needed to get that off the ground and keep it all running? I think you are exaggerating when talking about "millions". Companies running in old school DC will not build the actual DC. They will rent a 42U cabinet or part of it. You can typically rent 1/4 of a cabinet for a few hundred bucks a month. I you operate at a small scale, you typically don't have…

What kind of specs are you getting for that kind of money? Just played around with AWS pricing calculator and honestly it seems like EC2 is even more cost-effective than I thought, depending on specs...

Edit: Try using https://awstcocalculator.com and see what it claims your savings would be (I'm curious how accurate it is)

Re: Effectively using AWS Reserved Instances

#92

Post by bscanlan »

taormina wrote: post #69
sonnyblarney wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how arbitrary AWS instances are in any way going to go 'obsolete'. They have been around for a decade and are becoming more and more normative. Second, the underlying financial principle is that with visibility comes lower volatility comes lower cost - that's some very basic financial logic that's at play here. Yes, of course the contract implies a degree of vendor lock-in, but this is inherent in the nat…

No, the GP is referring to things like c3 vs c5 families. When you're locked into the 3 year old hardware, you have to pay the cost of upgrading eventually.

Note that AWS offer convertible reservations, and this is what Stripe say they use in the article.

Re: Effectively using AWS Reserved Instances

#93

Post by jhatax »

rohan404 wrote: post #80

One of the major issues we've seen with our customers is that many of them (especially startups and SMBs/SMEs) don't have the ability to dedicate a team to just managing their RI capacity. We've also seen enterprise customers optimizing up to 70% of their EC2 usage, but many of them have trouble ensuring a level of utilization due to rapidly changing infrastructure. I'd definitely argue that GCP has a better model fo…

Disclosure: I am a PM on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

I am aware that AWS and GCP are the go-to options for this audience, and that Oracle isn’t particularly favored for the Java lawsuit (among other things). If you are able to set these grievances aside, the OCI pricing team has done something unique: they have created a means by which you can effectively buy credits from Oracle and use them for whatever service (current or future) you need. It is called the Universal Credits Model (UCM) [1].

If you anticipate usage above a certain threshold, tier-based discounts are available at the time of purchase. It’s like a store gift card; buy whatever you want. This takes away some of the stress of capacity planning and instance-type selection. Additionally, you can adopt new services and avail lower prices in the future.

With UCM, customers:

1. Sign one single contract that provides unlimited access to all current and future Oracle PaaS and IaaS services (Compute, DB, Block Storage, Blob Storage, Network, etc.) spanning both Oracle Cloud and Oracle Cloud at Customer. 2. Gain on-demand access to all services plus the benefit of the lower cost of pre-paid services. Depending on the projected spend, customers can negotiate discounts. 3. Possess the flexibility to upgrade, expand or move services across datacenters based on their requirements. 4. Have the freedom to switch PaaS or IaaS services they are using without having to notify Oracle. 5. Can adopt new services when they GA.

Please send any questions my way, and I will get answers to you.

(1) https://www.oracle.com/cloud/bring-your-own-license/faq/univ...

Re: Effectively using AWS Reserved Instances

#94

Post by vidarh »

hinkley wrote: post #82
alex_young wrote: post #15

The notion that the break even point is 70% is ignoring some really important stuff. If you reserve workload x on hardware y for n years, you're effectively strapping yourself into a sure-to-be-obsolete and more expensive platform which you'll have to then move off of at an arbitrary point n years in the future. If you don't move, you wind up paying a premium to be stuck with the obsolete / more expensive platform ju…

I wonder how this is better than buying hardware. Some of the same problems but more flexibility than RI.

It's not unless you depend on a huge amount of other AWS services. Buying hardware and colocating - or even paying month to month to rent servers from a dedicated hosting provider will typically be much cheaper than reserved instances.

Re: Effectively using AWS Reserved Instances

#95

Post by chillydawg »

njovin wrote: post #75
msravi wrote: post #60

My experience with AWS reserved instances has not been very good previously. 1. Once you buy a reserved instance, you're locked in to that type and price for the duration, even though newer types at lower prices may get introduced (as they almost definitely would over 1-3 yrs). 2. If you're from outside the US, you might not be able to resell your reserved instance. So you're stuck with an old instance type at an inf…

I’ve gotten proactive emails from our account manager when they release new/cheaper instances and they offer us the option to transition and get a credit for our existing RIs. We aren’t a huge account (less than 30k/month) so I thought this was a nice gesture on Amazon’s part.

AWS probably want the old less power efficient gear out of their DCs as soon as possible.

Re: Effectively using AWS Reserved Instances

#96

Post by sitkack »

outworlder wrote: post #47
patrickg_zill wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having run a small hosting company for about 17 years now, I am laughing at this post... You greatly overstated the difficulty and understate the massive cost savings.

No they didn't. Because you are a hosting company. Not all companies have your expertise - most don't.

The hyperbolic difficulty that folks are applying to running your own hardware is laughable. It is as if by miracle alone that civilization made it through the precarious transitionary period where we racked our own servers into the Wonderous Utopia of Cloud.

I definitely wouldn't tie my own shoe laces, only the largest orgs need laces, almost everyone can focus on walking if they use Velcro.

Re: Effectively using AWS Reserved Instances

#97

Post by Joe8Bit »

boulos wrote: post #85
sonnyblarney wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm only making a very general reference to the fact that long-term visibility and predictability entails lower cost and therefore lower price, and that business owners are likely more empowered to determine that outlook than the cloud provider, either AWS or Google. Ergo - some kind of customer oriented long term lock-in would likely, in the long run, produce the cheapest prices in the system. That's all.

Ahh, I misunderstood your point! Yes, it’s certainly easier for us providers if you provide a clear demand signal. RIs, CUDs, SUDs, and even general contracting terms each provide some measure of information between customer and provider. We actually had an interesting debate about this topic at the NSF Workshop on Cloud Economics [1]. The AWS person sadly had to cancel, but both some Google people and MSFT people we…

(as a ridiculous aside, apparently having 'NSFW' in a link can trigger overly aggressive web filters)

Re: Effectively using AWS Reserved Instances

#98

Post by Joe8Bit »

scrollaway wrote: post #87
njovin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve gotten proactive emails from our account manager when they release new/cheaper instances and they offer us the option to transition and get a credit for our existing RIs. We aren’t a huge account (less than 30k/month) so I thought this was a nice gesture on Amazon’s part.

Our 15k/month account did not get such an email when they introduced the dc2 redshift class, despite most of our spend being on Redshift.

I'm consistently surprised at how big the variance in quality of service is from different AWS account managers; seemingly regardless of the size of account.

The 2/3 reps we've had have been night and day in the level of service they've given us, and we're a top 10% customer by volume.

Re: Effectively using AWS Reserved Instances

#99

Post by ti_ranger »

outworlder wrote: post #45
yani wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using GCC still feels like comparing an early android to a modern iOS. I guess they have to sell it cheap when the features and quality is not there.

Whatever GCP has is rock-solid and often superior to AWS. For example: when AWS encounters non-catastrophic issues with their hypervisor, you are on the hook for moving the instances away (meaning stop-start, or termination and relaunch for instance store). Depending on the instance type, this can cause service disruption. GCP will transparently migrate the VM while it is running for you. You never see it, you custom…

> Whatever GCP has is rock-solid and often superior to AWS.

A number of global outages in various network-related APIs or features on GCP in the past year says otherwise. I don't think there has been any global or even multi-region outage at AWS in many many years, the biggest recent outage for S3 in one region (us-east-1) impacted the internet more than any of the (~3) global outages at GCP and some other recent ones at Azure.

> For example: when AWS encounters non-catastrophic issues with their hypervisor, you are on the hook for moving the instances away (meaning stop-start, or termination and relaunch for instance store).

Apparently this is only for older instance types.

> GCP will transparently migrate the VM while it is running for you. You never see it, you customers don't either.

If you never see it from GCP, how do you know AWS doesn't do it for more recent instance types?

> Same for networking: if you use their "premium" network, you can have anycast IPs to the closest POP, which will route traffic on Google's Network, not the open internet.

There may be good reasons for this ...

Re: Effectively using AWS Reserved Instances

#100

Post by jakozaur »

My experience from Sumo Logic is to take full advantage of RIs you need to do capacity planning and that takes some effort. Still that's way over 30% of savings which are needed if you run at scale.

Would recommend using CloudHealth or other tool vs. using custom ETL. I tried do it myself on my tools, but got worse results than using dedicated tool.

However, dedicated tool need input from development. Sometimes it's worth to buy non-convertible RIs for bigger instance. Sometimes convertible RIs are easier. I just found that convertible RIs with some upfront are incredible tricky to calculate amortisation.

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