Amazon is using the same trick with AWS pricing as cellphone providers: they rely on bad math capabilities of their clients. The costs for one single item, in the case of AWS this is one hour of computing, is incredibly low, parts of a cent - but most people out there are not able to do simple maths like multiplication (by 720, the number of hours in a month) or summation (with the costs of the other services you have to implicitly use).
When hosting a simple one-node Kubernetes cluster the costs are easily at a three-figure number per month - the fees for EKS, the fee for the EC2 node, the fee for the inbound load balancer, the fee for storage, ... compared to a root server for $10 that easily outperforms a $60 EC2 instance that's really overpriced.
We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud
1–10 of 25 posts
Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud
#2test comment
Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud
#3test comment
thanks for this valuable input
Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud
#4It's how the whole 'cloud' operates; and it only adds up. The cloud is a complete scam in costs, especially if you're using it for very high compute tasks, deep learning, source control management or CI/CD.
Another example of this scam is Firebase (aka Google Cloud). Popular with mobile devs who not only risk getting locked in, but are offered limited functionality (Firestore) that charges for reads which that optimises for a huge bill if one is not careful.
For servers, as soon as you add Kubernetes, just remember to not show the 'operating costs' section of the balance sheet to the investors, unless you have a healthy recurring revenue stream.
Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud
#5Not a big AWS fan or anything, but...
> they rely on bad math capabilities of their clients
No, they don't. Showing hourly prices makes sense for hourly services.
They also provide a detailed cost estimator, because the arithmetic gets pretty detailed: https://calculator.aws
> compared to a root server for $10 that easily outperforms a $60 EC2 instance that's really overpriced.
Let's say a developer costs $75/hr. If AWS saves my dev team 10 hrs/mo., then I'm willing to pay a $750 premium for it.
Developer costs are also unpredictable. Turnover will cause spikes in my costs, for example.
Server costs are predictable. If I need to pay AWS more to save my developers time, I can always do that. I can't always just throw another developer onto my team when I need one.
The only people who are optimizing for three-figure costs every month are either: 1) paying very, very low salaries to their developers, or 2) not thinking about their biggest cost, which is developer time.
> When hosting a simple one-node Kubernetes cluster
Who would do this and why? Why would you have a load balancer in front of a single server?
Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud
#6If you've got funding (or immediate profitability due to traction) and a hockey stick growth rate, the cloud makes sense. It's just the cost of business to support rapidly scaling and developer velocity to try to capture as much of the market as fast as possible. As long as your profit stays ahead of your cloud costs, mission accomplished.
If the above does not apply, of course you're going to be better off using a combination of Cloudflare (CDN, networking), Backblaze (object store, also has S3 compatibility layer), and either dedicated service providers (OVH) or VPS providers (Digital Ocean). Perhaps even colocation if you've got the experience in house (Stackoverflow and Wikipedia, for example).
AWS and other cloud providers are designed for the price insensitive, who prefer having a single vendor, more abstraction away from the metal, or require support for bursty workloads. Shop around and model your run rate based on expected workloads. There is no best or worst solution, only a scale of solutions for your use case(s), ranging from suboptimal to optimal.
Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud
#7Thank you for the twitter post.
Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud
#8what i think most of people are not getting about cloud providers is that you can surely get better deal out of your money if you go to bare metal, but what you will miss out is a lot of services that come with AWS and that you would end up provision and maintain (e.g. S3, cloudfront). If you are a large business that can afford certain upfront costs to setup certain services cloud services might not be the best place, but for pretty much everyone I think you get a very simplified environment to start your business.
Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud
#9During the COVID-19 pandemic I found myself doing nothing interesting during the weekends, so I decided to offer my AWS knowledge to medium sized companies in regards to their monthly expenses in cloud compute. I thought I would help them save a couple of thousand dollars from their annual bills, but so far I already shaved more than $100k from three different companies. I am quite excited about this side gig, and I hope to be able to continue helping other companies this year too.
Re: We Are Saving Costs by Dumping AWS Cloud
#10Yeah but you can spin up everything you need in a day. Then you can shut it all down. If you’re a startup, it can make a ton of sense.