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Why Cloud Infrastructure Pricing Is Absurd
itwbennett writes "Two reports out this week, one a new 'codex' released by 451 Research and the other an updated survey into cloud IaaS pricing from Redmonk, show just how insane cloud pricing has become. If your job requires you to read these reports, good luck. For the rest of us, Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady distilled the pricing trends down to this: 'HP offers the best compute value and instance sizes for the dollar. Google offers the best value for memory, but to get there it appears to have sacrificed compute. AWS is king in value for disk and it appears no one else is even trying to come close. Microsoft is taking the 'middle of the road,' never offering the best or worst pricing.'"
"Google offers the best value for memory, but to get there it appears to have sacrificed compute."
The submitter seems to have sacrificed the end of his sentence.
Seems like you can pick which vendor gives you the best value based on the use case of your application. Doesn't seem that absurd to me at all.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Every time I read these types of articles, I feel like implementation cost is always ignored. Sure, maybe I get some extra compute for my dollar here, or some extra memory there, but how long did it take to integrate this solution using a given vendor's APIs and services? How easily can I script scale-up and scale-down policies? How effective are those scaling policies at actually saving me resources and money? I think this is kind of an old-fashioned way of calculating infrastructure pricing - it's more complex than just pricing out servers that happen to be somewhere else. Major caveat, however - it's awfully tough to calculate some of those intangibles accurately enough to put in a whitepaper...
the cloud is there to avoid the PHB from sticker shock of a huge price tag of a capital expense and hide it in a perpetual monthly payment. especially for smaller companies.
cloud isn't there to save anyone any money
Insane good?
Insane bad?
Insane, literally insane, where it includes payment only by Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions?
See there are these things called internal and external hard drives see...They actually keep your files see...You own it ya see....Check them out they are pretty cool instead of this "cloud" thing everyone speaks of. Heaven forbid you actually own your own storage and backups....old school rules....
Seems like you can pick which vendor gives you the best value based on the use case of your application. Doesn't seem that absurd to me at all.
Infrastructure is sort of like being a car manufacturer - a lot of investment in hardware, facilities and people; meaning the barriers to entry are quite high. Sure, I could piece together my own infrastructure in my basement, but to offer the bandwidth and up time that the big boys offer? NFW. The power (as in alternating current from my utility) alone is an issue and there's a bunch of things that add together to make a 99% up time system that isn't exactly off the shelf knowledge or technology.
In short, they can charge that much because they can.
Seriously, a 128 core blade server with tons of TB in DDR3 and a couple of SSD boxes are pretty darned cheap.
And then your data doesn't get "stolen" or "lost".
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
meow meow f1rst p0st yeeha 10 years and going str0ng!
I see that you are a Cloud Engineer.
Do you have 25 years of experience in cloud computing and experience with mice?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And I still have no freaking idea why the Headline calls the pricing "absurd" or the summary calls it "insane". I'm going to have to actually RTFA to find out what any halfway intelligent summary should have done. If you're story calls it absurd and insance, the for the love of Pete, explain why in the least! Absurdly low? Absurdly high? Absurdly complex? FFS!
But SUSE is doing a pretty good job in advertising its IAAS Cloud Strategy :
SUSE Cloud Strategy
Let's start by using "codex" correctly. (Or, in this case, not using it at all...) It's not a secret decoder ring. It's a bound set of pages. Or a "book", but not necessarily with a cover. A codex be a guide to decoding or translating something, but that would be completely incidental, as the word carries no such meaning.
One very important aspect to pay attention to is the advertised performance service you will get. CPU cycles, size of memory, volume of storage, amount of networking bandwidth are all sure to be price points and advertising points. I would encourage everyone to pay attention to any fine print about:
*dedicated vs shared CPU. The biggest problem with CPU sharing is that CPU cycles are scheduled to be shared on over subscribed "cloud" providers, which helps lower cost. Oversubscribed CPU cycles causes CPU wait time, which means that your "cloud" CPU may need to wait X amount of time to be scheduled for your N CPU cores that you are paying for. Let's say that you have 8 CPU's, you may need to wait for 8 CPU's to be unused on the physical host your are on before you get to do any work at all. If you have 1 or 2 CPU's than this is far less of an issue. The greater the core count the bigger the issue.
*Memory ballooning. Memory is one of the most easily over subscribed resources in "clouds". To cut costs Memory is allocated to you at, let's say 12GB. But you only use 6GB. On the back end you are really only given 6GB. Going further let's say that you have 12GB, use only 6GB, but only have 4GB actively in use by your application. There are memory scheme's out there that will write the 2GB that you do not use very often to disk(think swapping intelligently).
*Disk IO speeds. Storage can be really cheap or really expensive depending on how it is architected. Pay attention to any fine print talking about what the storage consists of and if you have any kind of dedicated Disk IO. The cheapest "cloud storage" provider may be offering a product that works great for highly cached low transaction websites. But that same provider may give poor performance for a high rate of disk transaction logging server, or high transactional application.
*bandwidth limitations. Pay attention to quality of service limits. Pay attention to bandwidth sharing, do you get full advertised bandwidth to the internet or do you get "up to bandwidth" limits. Network connections to other servers that are co-hosted could be as fast as 40+GB/s. If it matters to your application ask if there are higher bandwidth connections between co-hosted servers.
*backups, service uptimes, service failure compensation, riders on the contract that talk about lower temporary performance in the event of a hardware failure. Options for expansion of resources(hot or cold).
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
They call that a private cloud. People with sensitive data requirements need to use that to enjoy the cloud. You do not get the price breaks you get for public/shared infrastructure clouds.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Cloud computation sites like CEX.io and Cloudhashing.com and are for those who don't want to house their computation mechanism at home. The cloud cost at least triple compare to similar (performance-wise) hardware, but you don't have to deal with electricity and stuff, plus you can sell back your hashing power to the exchange.
New Economic Perspectives
My question is serious.
Is there a compelling reason for a company or an individual to
use cloud services and in so doing rely on others for security,
reliability, and other important functions ?
My guess is that the only real reasons someone would use the
cloud are either stupidity or false economy, or a mixture of the two.
If I have missed something please advise.
]
They can't even achieve 10% uptime? That's pretty bad.
Most IT services and applications have gone to extremely complicated price models now. The purpose is to confuse upper level management so that they just decide to buy the highest level of service because they can't figure out what any of the levels mean.
Try reading the MS SQL Server license guides. It's more complicated than the software itself and even has quick reference guides and instructions on how to read the guides. Most managers just say to buy the most expensive so they know they're covered.
Always interesting to hear the Henrietta Pussycat perspective on cloud computing.
Dark Reflection
Are you high? Azure has a higher uptime than AWS. Stop spreading your anti-MS bullshit, or at least cough up a source.
There are extra features that could make big differences. Noone can match Azure's 9.99999999999% uptime.
Uncertain if decimal point placement was accidental or intentional...
So far, I've yet to find ANY pricing that beats my VPS provider, DigitalOcean... Google included.
That is possibly more moronic than simply mistaking a verb for a noun.
No, it's not moronic. Slang is never moronic, it just is. That is how language evolves, especially within subgroups... even I at the periphery of the cloud world (as I'm primarily a developer and not a sysadmin) understood what "compute" meant and didn't even think twice reading it.
The fact that you had trouble with it merely means you exist more outside that world than the people using it, not that there is anything wrong with the word itself.
After all, shorter is just about always better in communications, as long as the message remains equally clear. A word like compute saves two verbose words while saying exactly the same thing, a clear win.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nope, but I do have to deal with it on a daily basis...
Cloud pricing is insane (and insanely complex) because otherwise the vendor wouldn't make any real money off of it.
Take AWS for instance. Sure, the spot pricing is cheap as hell. Well, it would be, if they didn't charge you $0.11/GB-hour for storage, a penny-fraction for every 10,000 GET requests you receive (and a similar price for every 1,000 PUT/form requests), and a zillion other nickel-and-dime charges that turn a forecasted $300/mo. estimate into a $3200/mo. OpEx ( for five moderately-busy servers w/ a small DB... basically a smallish-sized commercial website).
I know this because I just inherited one of these. My predecessor promised cheap, I'm stuck with managing expensive (and am moving the #$@! thing back into our existing colo space as soon as I can practically do so...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
That reminds me of a song by Red Peters: Ballad Of A Dog Named Stains.
It is when it's *marketing* slang...
I will grant you that is true, marketing manufactured words often fall flat. "Compute" is not that case though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
my employer had an interesting result when looking at these factors, which is: AWS is the same cost as our own datacenter for heavily utilized systems. Where a savings can be realized is in hosting burst or temporary capacity. Or, I suppose, if you don't' have your own DC. It makes sense, AWS pricing would have to ultimately be the same as anyone else's datacenter, with maybe a little economy of scale thrown in. But any well run DC should price out in the same neighborhood.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Since the start had big problems, but the reasons are the worrysome ones, sometimes for misconfigured network devices, forgetting to update a SSL certificate, dealing with leap years, and even over DNS (this one was last month, and took down other MS services).
Well, if they use Azure for TFS it was probably intentional
Do you have 25 years of experience in cloud computing and experience with mice?
25 years of experience in cloud computing? Check.
Experience with mice? Check.
It does come down to that, but only almost. When you consider what it takes to dink around with VPC, along with other infrastructure integration hassles (not to mention the sysadmin's time in ramping-up and dealing with them)? It can get pricey in a hurry. Gets even worse when you have a *nix-heavy environment, and discover that unless you want to jump through a ton of hoops, you can only migrate 'doze server 2003/8 VMs to it.
Now as a cold-start remote DR site that you build-up (say, leave your DB on in there to replicate data from prod while the other instances sleep)? It's not a completely bad way to go. In my case, I already have a colo and an existing infrastructure that I can move the thing into, so my costs will actually drop by quite a bit.
All said and done? My biggest (and TBH only real) complaint is the semi-hidden costs that AWS barfs on you after you get stuff up and running. Unless you know them first-hand (or get really lucky digging through the paperwork while in the estimation stage), you can be very easily bitten by the nickle-and-dime stuff (as my predecessor was bitten, unfortunately).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
mouse slipped, modded overrated instead of funny. please ignore.
So consider anything you put on those cloud, copyied by the NSA. So if you are concurring against an US firm, consider the NSA sometime use their spying to give local industry an advantage. Nuff said.
What about encryption, key management, reliability, uptime, consistent throughput and 20 or 30 other things?
I know this because I just inherited one of these. My predecessor promised cheap, I'm stuck with managing expensive (and am moving the #$@! thing back into our existing colo space as soon as I can practically do so...)
Sounds like your predecessor fell for a scam that's existed since time immemorial. Outsourcing isn't always cheaper. How can it be when the company you're outsourcing to faces the exact same costs as you do but needs to make a profit on top?
Oh, sure, it is under some specific circumstances. But the idea that it always is is downright lazy management.
some don’t actually publish their prices
hawguy wrote:
and use the published pricing
Insane secret, so insane bad.
Now I work for a small company, we used to colo two servers but our host sucked (a lot of downtime) although it was cheap, we then looked in more reliable hosts, but was going to be way more expensive
We then looked at amazon. It was 1/3 of the price as our existing colo (not as much computing power but enough for us) and up time has been way better,.
Our bill is now similar to what we were paying, but we also now have 8 servers running vs the two before. We use micro instances for 6 of our servers, and medium instance for the others. I do imagine with the bigger servers the cost would start going up.. but for a small company, cloud computing is extremely cost effective.
Is there a cloud service provider that allows complete usage-based payment? Where you don't select how much storage/computing/bandwith you need when you select your plan but at the end of the month you have to pay for whatever you used.
Maybe my website only needs a few Mb/s of data transfer, but if a video suddenly goes viral, the cloud provider can automatically increase the bandwith to my website. And at the end of the month I only have to pay for whatever data upload/download I used. (and similar for cpu cycles, data storage and memory use)
Monitoring the hell out of your environment before you ship anything there is the key to running anything on someone else's datacenter. Then run it through the sausage-making estimation routines to find an approximate costs. I keep looking at the player's cost structures here and to be honest, it's not cost effective. Yet.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
Beats everyone?
https://www.digitalocean.com/
when most women wore a codex at a certain time of month, although they spelled it differently back then
Time after time i read critisism of cloud services which exhibit a total misunderstanding of the opportunity they provide. Sure if you mistake the opportunity for 'virtual hosting' and move your 24/7 DC operation out to AWS you will end up paying far more than if you 'in-house'.
However if you use 'cloud' as it has evolved to be (as a distinct genus from virtual hosting) then the key is that u can use a server for an hour a month to cope with peak demand, and only pay for that hour. To do this 'in house' you need to pay for the server and its 24/7 availability - something that will cost much more than a few $ paid to AWS.
When talking 'cloud' the key is not technology or price, it is the 'big picture economics' of the problem you are trying to resolve. The important thing is that when you don't need it you don't pay.
D2
You can also have it the other way around. How about some IT dude over estimating capacity needs and then ordering hardware for it and then getting stuck with really expensive machines and high TCO...