AWS EC2 General Price Cut(aws.amazon.com) |
AWS EC2 General Price Cut(aws.amazon.com) |
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.
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.
As I've mentioned in another post, Hetzner also sells for less than 50€/month dedicated hosts with 64GB of RAM running an Intel i7 6700 professor (4 cores, 8threads).
With that you also get unlimited network traffic over a dedicated 1Gb connection.
It is called service for a reason.
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.
Some companies are making billions of dollars, that’s why we see so much content about the cloud and very few about building your own cloud with dedicated providers, which by the way handle electricity, network and basic hardware maintenance for pennies compared to cloud guys. They even have some basic managed services like backups, S3-compatible storage etc. these days.
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).
Our typical buy - 2 socket intel cascade lake Xeon Gold 6256(12 Cores, 24 threads) with 768 GiB of RDIMM costs us approx. 70000 DKK or $10200.
The biggest cost here is memory. Just to give you an idea.
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.
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.
1x ryzen 3990x with 64 cores(128 vcores) would be 4k € 1x a mainboard ~0,5k € 1x 128 GB RAM ~ 0,7k € Storage, whatever you need 0.5k case + power supply 0.3k
so 6k all around for a much higher perfomance pc...
a ryzen 24cores(48vcores) ~ 1k 1x a mainboard ~0,3k 1x 96GB Ram ~0,5k Storage, whatever you need 0.5k case + power supply 0.3k
so 2.6 k should be around the same in raw consumer hardware
So you can just get somewhere between 5 to 7 of those instances for the price you're paying for your single EC2 instance.
I know it is not Christmas yet but it would be great if those prices trend to marginal cost for the sake of innovation.
"You may not use Amazon Lightsail in a manner intended to avoid incurring data fees from other Services (e.g., proxying network traffic from Services to the public Internet or other destinations or excessive data processing through load balancing Services as described in the Documentation), and if you do, we may throttle or suspend your data services or suspend your account."
18% reductions for 1 year terms in Europe.
8% in mnt US region for 1 year term. No savings elsewhere.
Some prices reductions elsewhere in the world.
My 'back of the napkin' calculations indicate it would take very little time for it to pay for itself by purchasing your own NVIDIA GPU(s) and running them from a colo.
Especially if your requirements are for the instance(s) to run 24x7.
In the many years I've used cloud I've never requested support, so in my experience I don't need to calculate that in.
And even when you consider machine costs, as long as you can get at least 1 yr (not an unreasonable assumption) out of your equipment you're more than making up for what it would've cost in the cloud.
You can even buy Tesla V100s that power AWS accelerated instances.
The demand right now has also fallen dramatically even from regular customers.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/coronavirus-motherboard-gr...
I often wonder why Hetzner dont expand internationally.
Monte Carlo simulations? PDE computations?
Noticed a huge 20% reduction in some other areas though...
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/google-comput...
If you have a massive amount of data, you can always get AWS to transfer it to you via a Snowball for $30/TB + a $300 fee.
of course, AWS will play there too, but doesn't mean the overall ratios won't tilt towards the edge (although plenty of data "left" for the clouds since overall data will continue to grow).
That is a contradiction in terms.
According to the OED:
Extort means to "obtain (something) by force, threats, or other unfair means."
Customer means "a person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or business"
Thus, extortion is a coercive relationship--we call the target of extortion a victim, not a customer.
The relationship of a vendor and customer is voluntary.
But if they had changed the price after a customer became sufficiently invested in AWS, that would be using "unfair means", to obtain the customer's continued business.
220 pan.alephnull.com dictd 1.12.1/rf on Linux 4.4.0-1-amd64 <auth.mime> <114924196.15062.1589085014@pan.alephnull.com>
150 15 definitions retrieved
151 "Extortion" gcide "The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48"
Extortion \Ex*tor"tion\, n. [F. extorsion.]
1. The act of extorting; the act or practice of wresting
anything from a person by force, by threats, or by any
undue exercise of power; undue exaction; overcharge.
[1913 Webster]
2. (Law) The offense committed by an officer who corruptly
claims and takes, as his fee, money, or other thing of
value, that is not due, or more than is due, or before it
is due. --Abbott.
[1913 Webster]
3. That which is extorted or exacted by force.
Syn: Oppression; rapacity; exaction; overcharge.
[1913 Webster]
.
151 "extortion" wn "WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006)"
extortion
n 1: an exorbitant charge
2: unjust exaction (as by the misuse of authority); "the
extortion by dishonest officials of fees for performing their
sworn duty"
3: the felonious act of extorting money (as by threats of
violence)
.
"an exhorbitant charge"tldr; The number "512" when talked about in the context of RAM is assumed to be measured in MB, but 512 GB is also a less-commonly-encountered amount of RAM. :)
SLC NAND SSD could be had for $0.4/GB, I failed to see why DRAM should be priced at 10x higher.
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.
If anything, it generated a lot of cheap secondhand cards for sale in some places.
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.
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.
No it isn't. Hetzner provides full blown linux instances with 2GB of RAM, while the Ligthsail instance type you're trying to compare has a barely workable 512MB of RAM. That's the equivalent of a meager Orange Pi Zero.
The Lightsail instance type that is equivalent to Hetzner's 4€/month instance is sold for 20€/month.
Amazon quite rightly charge a higher price for some portions of AWS--transparently, up front, with tools to assess usage and estimate fees beforehand--because they created a product that many organizations believe provides extraordinary value.
And for the sin of earning a profit through voluntary trade, a vocal minority of HN damns them every single time AWS is mentioned. Every time we let this evil behavior go unchallenged, all productive individuals are diminished.
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 sustaining 100 gbps transfer for 30 days on Amazon is orders of magnitude higher than paying for one month of 100 gbps of IP transit.
They’ve normalized a pricing structure that is disconnected from any actual cost basis. You’re free to pay for it, but it’s quite amusing to say criticizing that is unjust.
Not everything is priced based on the cost of it's inputs. In this case it seems to be what the market will bear.
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.
> 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.
https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1172239124251709449?s=1...
Giving you an option to only bulk egress is not the same either, since the most common scenario for egress would be operational day-to-day inter-network scenarios.
If there is an unreasonably high fee for exiting a provider's cloud, to any other network location, on an operational basis, it is actively discouraging exiting the provider's services creating a kind of price barrier that could be cost prohibitive for operational inter-networking.
Operational inter-networking, to me, encourages competition not discourages it.
For example, perhaps I want to use Microsoft Azure's Data Factory to move data from AWS S3 to Redshift. It is not possible as far as I know without egress from AWS to Microsoft's network, and then back again. But surely these clouds are connected with peering relationships making the cost of ingress/egress negligible, so why is this not allowed? That would allow users of the cloud to freely mix and match services from among many clouds.
The world I see today does not seem to encourage such competition.
Apple did the same thing with Webkit. Google came onboard and for awhile, everyone was releasing Webkit compatible browsers.
1. That fee is in addition to S3 retrieval costs.
> Q: What does it cost to export my data?
> In addition to the Export job fees detailed on our pricing page, you will also be charged all fees incurred to retrieve your data from Amazon S3.
https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/faqs/
2. $30/TB isn’t even cheap by itself.
S3 request fees are $.0004 per 1000 GET requests. If you had 100000 objects (files) you would pay $40
To be fair, that's how all products are priced in general: production cost defines the lower bound and what customers are willing to pay defines the upper bound, and the goal is to maximize what the customer pays.