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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
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".
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oooh pretty clouds - must listen to advertisers and buy stuff we don't need - nom nom nom
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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?
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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
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.
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?
My guess is that you've never managed a data center, or specced a large enterprise application to serve high numbers of simultaneous users, if you think that cloud offers a "false economy" to users.
Certainly, you can waste money on cloud by pushing "everything" into the cloud. But you can save shitloads of money by adopting a cloud model as well. If you simply need to expand into a cloud provider occasionally to accommodate seasonal peaks, then you can save yourself massive amounts of infrastructure cost - no need to build an 8 megawatt datacenter to house all the servers required to service your projected peak load (think: tax season, christmas shopping season, other 'peak usage' times where a business might get relatively low usage for most of the year, and then see a massive surge for a week or a month) - when a 2 MW data center serves your needs 330 days of the year.
Cloud providers also provide agile expansion and contraction of capacity if you plan your architecture well.
Often, cloud provider datacenters provide same-or-higher-quality security, reliability, and management than what Joe Schmo would build for his small 20 person office, as well.
Don't discount it because YOU have not had a personal need for it. There's lots of cases where it's a sensible decision, even if it's not ALWAYS the sensible decision.
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.
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