Why Cloud Infrastructure Pricing Is Absurd

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Why Cloud Infrastructure Pricing Is Absurd

Posted by Soulskill on Friday December 13, 2013 @06:09AM from the buzzwords-as-a-service dept.

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.'"

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Sentence doesn't make sense by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-13 06:12 · Score: 5, Funny

"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.
1. Re:Sentence doesn't make sense by davidbrit2 · 2013-12-13 06:38 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  The IT world suddenly seems to be under the impression that "compute" can be used as a noun. Either that or they were referring to the old '80s C64 magazine and forgot to capitalize the C.
2. Re:Sentence doesn't make sense by ahem · 2013-12-13 06:57 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  "compute" in a cloud context == "compute capacity". Think of it like first and last name. If I'm "Rob Jones", and someone calls me "Rob", it doesn't turn me into a verb.
  
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  Not A Sig
Doesn't seem that absurd by trybywrench · 2013-12-13 06:15 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
1. Re:Doesn't seem that absurd by tepples · 2013-12-13 06:32 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  The impression I get from the article is that the writer found that infrastructure providers' price models make "picking a vendor appropriate for the task at hand" not the easiest job.
2. Re:Doesn't seem that absurd by gstoddart · 2013-12-13 06:36 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I liken it more to comparing cell-phone plans.
  Some features are included in one, but not the other. Some thing are add-ons. Some things aren't even available.
  Trying to get a "compare like to like" is damned near impossible, because they've carefully set them up so it's impossible to do that.
  Which means if you're trying to evaluate several of these services to figure out which is the best value for your needs, you need to do extensive fiddling to get them described in the same terms and actually be able to understand what you're seeing.
  
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  Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Don't forget hidden costs by i_hate_robots · 2013-12-13 06:16 · Score: 5, Insightful

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...
get used to the monthly payment by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-13 06:20 · Score: 3, Interesting

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
1. Re:get used to the monthly payment by Copid · 2013-12-13 07:21 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Recurring costs are everyhere in IT. Power, AC, floor space, people to guard your servers, replacing broken/obsolete hardware. This is nothing new. It's not like you just buy a big ass server and watch it run forever with no recurring support costs.
  
  I think a lot of people here are massivly underestimating the total cost of a unit of computing resources when they run it in their own machine rooms. It's not like your machine room is any more efficient to operate than Amazon's. In fact, it's probably massively less efficient unless you're a pretty big operation. The only cost they have that you don't have is "profit for Amazon."
  
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  An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
In short,because they can by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-13 06:25 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.
1. Re:In short,because they can by 0123456 · 2013-12-13 08:07 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Nah, they use it because managers get fat bonuses for 'cost reduction', and have moved on to another job before people discover what a disaster it was.
You can buy 2 TB flash drives now by WillAffleckUW · 2013-12-13 06:31 · Score: 3, Insightful

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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1. Re:You can buy 2 TB flash drives now by tepples · 2013-12-13 06:37 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Connecting that blade server to other Internet services and to customers and protecting your service from hardware or software failure can become a challenge. "The cloud" (someone else's computer) provides Internet connectivity, failover to a fresh instance, and managed backup.
2. Re:You can buy 2 TB flash drives now by WillAffleckUW · 2013-12-13 06:48 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Depends on your "cloud" needs.
  Are you selling to millions of customers (lots of connections) or just maintaining internal databases for an organization (dramatically fewer).
  Not everyone is external facing. Most "needs" are local or regional.
  
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3. Re:You can buy 2 TB flash drives now by hawguy · 2013-12-13 07:25 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  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".
  Of course, you need 2 of them for redundancy. And a router. And a firewall. And a load balancer - all duplicated for redundancy. And multiple internet connections from different vendors (you don't trust your coloc for internet connectivity, right? That's like using a cloud provider).
  And then you need to duplicate the whole thing in another datacenter for geographical redundancy.
  And hire people to manage it all.
  Suddenly it's not so cheap when all you really needed is a half dozen 2 core servers and a few warm spares in the remote datacenter.
4. Re:You can buy 2 TB flash drives now by hawguy · 2013-12-13 09:55 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Of course, you need 2 of them for redundancy. And a router. And a firewall. And a load balancer - all duplicated for redundancy. And multiple internet connections from different vendors (you don't trust your coloc for internet connectivity, right?
  Do you even know what a blade server is? Redundant blades, redundant power supplies... redundant bloody everything.
  I do, and I even know the difference between a blade chassis and a blade server. And I've seen what happens when a voltage regulator failure on a blade takes out the entire 12V rail on the blade chassis (as well as taking out the blade next to it). No one that cares about reliability is going to run a single chassis.
  
  Firewalling, routing, and load balancing can be handled by VMs running on said ridiculously redundant blade server.
  Don't you still need people to set up all of those services?
  Does anyone really run their border firewall on the same blade chassis that run their servers? I won't even plug non-firewalled internet traffic into the same core switches that carry the rest of our traffic.
  
  Most businesses don't need geographical redundancy because they don't need 100% uptime. Very few do. I'd say the vast majority of the businesses (small to medium) out there can get by without their servers for a day. They might not like it, but they won't die.
  That's what businesses say when they haven't had a week-long outage because a transformer blew a hole in the side of their colocation center. Business continuity can make-or-break a business after a disaster - and it comes very cheap with most cloud computing solutions. Shipping hourly data snapshots to a remote coloc is cheap a business can be up and runnning at the remote site with no more than an hour of lost data.
  
  I used to work for a company that sold cloud services. It can be good for some use cases, but not so often as people seem to think.
  Sure, cloud computing is not for everyone, but a single blade chassis is not a replacement for cloud computing.
Re:meow meow f1rst p0st by WillAffleckUW · 2013-12-13 06:33 · Score: 3, Funny

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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Hidden performance when on the cheap by shuz · 2013-12-13 06:46 · Score: 5, Informative

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).

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There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
Re:meow meow f1rst p0st by Penguinisto · 2013-12-13 07:36 · Score: 5, Informative

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...)

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Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Re:Slang is never moronic by danlip · 2013-12-13 07:41 · Score: 3, Funny

Slang is never moronic, it just is
Clearly you don't know any teenagers.
Re:Slang is never moronic by SuperKendall · 2013-12-13 08:08 · Score: 3, Insightful

But it didn't remain clear, or we wouldn't have this thread.
It is clear within the subgroup that buys cloud resources, it just happens that Slashdot readership is a superset of that group.
But instead of some taking it as a learning opportunity they are demanding that language remain fixed, which seems like a fruitless pursuit to me.

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"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley