AWS EC2 General Price Cut (opens in new tab)

> Like 6 cores and 256GB memory for 150€/month (one older server I have there).

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.

Vultr has servers with pci certification.

With AWS you also pay for much more than just hardware.

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.

Then use a dedicated provider. You won't save as much, but in raw costs, you'll be about 2x ahead and in cost/performance you'll be 4x-8x (much more if you're a heavy bandwidth user, and much much more if proper hardware lets you scale vertically rather than prematurely having to scale horizontally).

Not exactly what you asked for. But, we bought an AMD server to test at our HPC cluster. AMD EPYC 7302P (16cores, 32 threads), 512 GiB of 3200 MHZ RDIMM, 10GBE, 3.2TiB of 12Gbps SAS SSD. It came out to be approx 48000 DKK (excluding VAT). That is approx. $7000. Fewer cores machine with faster clocks and we mostly use it for its memory channels(8).

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.

Current gen hardware is about 10-15k. If you buy used or legacy hardware (like what c5 runs on) you can get much more bang for buck.

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.

Not colocated, but in the US, you can find a dual EPYC 7742 (64 cores) with 512GB of ram (with ssds, hdds, and bandwidth included) for $1000/m.

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.

Yeah for big iron EC2 makes more sense. Still you can find similar eg this refurbished for 6k https://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSales/Online/SecondaryIn...

mhm, interesting question... i am not dabbing in the server space just in consumer hardware...

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

Not the same as buying hardware, but Hetzner offers dedicated AMD Epyc 7502p instances (32 cores, 128GB RAM, free egress) for less than 150€/month.

So you can just get somewhere between 5 to 7 of those instances for the price you're paying for your single EC2 instance.

Anticompetitive behavior when they clearly state the price? Of all the things that lock you in to any provider once you are at any scale, data isn’t the biggest one.

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.

I thought anticompetitive behavior was the exact opposite of price gouging. You sell below cost to put your competitors out of business. Evidently AWS isn't doing that with bandwidth.

the best form of competition will be simpler distributed compute, with the ability to more seamlessly process workloads across end user device, edge compute and cloud.

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).

It's nice to see that the increasing amount of hyperbole here isn't impacting everyone.

The grandparent's argument is that AWS is extorting the customer to remain a customer by making the cost of moving data out of AWS prohibitevly high. I don't think it is actual extortion (at least legally), since the egress prices are public, and you could argue if the customer had done due diligence they would have known the price when becoming a customer in the first place.

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"

You can coerce someone to be your customer.

Terms are commonly used metaphorically to show the speaker considers a given situation to resemble that term qualitatively but not exactly. Very commonly. Like, it's practically fundamental to our communication.

Good for backups though.

I wouldn’t risk AWS closing the account. It should work, but don’t know how would AWS view it.

"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."

Backblaze B2 is what you’re looking for.

I haven't done the math, but depending on your bandwidth requirements - you could try spinning up a couple vms at DigitalOcean/Linode/somewhere with bundled bandwidth, and then just run nginx as a cache with s3 as the backend.

Sounds like you just had a million dollar idea. Why not build it out and offer it to the many many other people in your position?

I do my own sysadmin work when needed, but I find plenty of places where I'm gladly willing to make the relatively small concession (pay the cloud markup). In the case of GPU instances I find they're not even trying to be competitive with market costs.

Power is accounted for in my calculations. Technically today's gpu compute does wonders for power consumption. And likely to only improve from here.

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.

Not sure what you mean. You can buy GPUs anywhere.

You can even buy Tesla V100s that power AWS accelerated instances.

The crypto scams seem to have died off, so there are probably plenty of used ones on the market.

The demand right now has also fallen dramatically even from regular customers.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/coronavirus-motherboard-gr...

Alternatively, some regions are cheaper to add capacity to than others (either cap-ex and/or op-ex), so extra capacity gets steered there.

EC2 also has GPU instances, right? The p2/p3/g3/g4 series.

The us-east-1 region is widely considered as the "default" region, and so it's where customers put resources when they don't have any particular reason to put it somewhere else. For that same reason, it's also where less-sophisticated customers are likely to run unreplicated workloads. It's also the oldest, and biggest, and home to the most different instance types and rack architectures. It makes life hard when your largest, oldest, weirdest, and most important region are all the same region, so AWS has been trying to nudge customers off of old instance types and out of us-east-1 with pricing changes for a long time.