
AWS EC2 General Price Cut - makeshifthoop
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-price-reduction-for-ec2-instance-saving-plans-and-standard-reserved-instances/
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rb808
Buying your own Physical hardware is so cheap now its crazy. A commodity Ryzen
16 vCPU box is about the same price as 2 months rent on EC2.

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.

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phamilton
Could someone a little more familiar with buying their own hardware tell me
how much hardware equivalent to a c5.12xlarge (48 cores, 96 GB) would cost?

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).

~~~
reacharavindh
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.

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ksec
I was just thinking the other day when HN were discussion Cloud vs Metal. How
little has the DRAM prices changed in the past 10 years. While CPU core went
from 10 to 64 Core, ( Not exactly Moores's law at least it is 6.4x the
difference ). DRAM median prices has remain mostly flat until recently, we
finally got pass $10 /GB ECC RAM and are now close to $5/GB. Which is still
very expensive.

SLC NAND SSD could be had for $0.4/GB, I failed to see why DRAM should be
priced at 10x higher.

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karterk
PR speak aside, it looks like they are trying to get people to switch to
certain regions, perhaps which are not popular with lot of idle machines? The
popular locations like Oregon and Virginia don't have much discounts to offer.

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idunno246
for the US regions, california is already ~25% more expensive, so this just
reduces the difference

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TechBro8615
Are they still extorting customers by price gouging bandwidth? Maybe one day
I’ll wake up to news they’ve decided to charge for capacity instead of
transfer.

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abtinf
> Are they still extorting customers...

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.

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

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abtinf
It's not just hyperbole, it's grossly unjust.

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.

~~~
TechBro8615
Wait, are you saying it’s _grossly unjust_ to criticize the pricing of
Amazon’s cloud product?

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_.

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pests
"[...]disconnected from any actual cost basis[...]"

Not everything is priced based on the cost of it's inputs. In this case it
seems to be what the market will bear.

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sudosysgen
Which in this case is exorbitant and is something that we should oppose.
Pricing as much as the market will bear is not good for consumers, and in some
cases is a red-mark of market failure (not in this one, as of yet).

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rumanator
> Pricing as much as the market will bear is not good for consumers

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.

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sudosysgen
The theory is that as time goes on, the prices moves from what the market will
bear to become closer to the cost of production. When this does not happen, it
is a failure of the market.

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lowdose
And traffic bandwidth?

I know it is not Christmas yet but it would be great if those prices trend to
marginal cost for the sake of innovation.

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uyuioi
Have traffic prices even moved in years? It’s such a blatant ripoff.

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pkulak
Good for backups though.

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djjsjdjsjsjs
Write once, read never!

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SteveNuts
I'm waiting for the day they announce bandwidth price cuts

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doctorfoo
this. the only way I can make profit with my web service is by using a third
party low budget CDN as a caching layer. Even with that, S3 data transfer
remains my biggest cost. if I could spare the time, I'd make a custom caching
layer so that S3 is never hit at all except for upload, and is used only for
disaster recovery.

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toomuchtodo
Backblaze B2 is what you’re looking for.

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ptman
And they are in the bandwidth alliance with cloudflare

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wolco
"The price reduction you receive, depends on the region you choose, whether
you take out a 1 or 3 year term and finally the instance family you commit to
in your agreement. Price reductions vary from between 1% to a massive 18% on
what you were previously paying"

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.

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toredash
This is far from a general price cut. It's a price cut only of you are willing
to commit to long term usage.

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unexaminedlife
I'm holding out for a better price on GPU instances (for parallel processing).

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.

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chrisseaton
Can you actually buy GPUs now? An advantage of Amazon in the past was that
they were actually available there, where they weren’t available to buy in
practice.

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

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

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chrisseaton
> Not sure what you mean.

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.

~~~
johntash
There were lots of GPUs being bought up for crypto mining reasons, but that
doesn't seem like it has been as big of a deal in the consumer market recently
(at least locally.)

If anything, it generated a lot of cheap secondhand cards for sale in some
places.

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boynamedsue
No change in pricing for GP2 in _six years_.

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infogulch
Hmm, given the uneven reductions between regions, I wonder if this is more of
a move to balance (and increase) demand so that it more closely matches their
supply. So then I guess the question is: why do they have excess supply?

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lawrenceyan
Competing cloud service providers gouging away at what used to be an AWS
monopoly that unfortunately for Amazon, no longer exists.

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

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ateevchopra
I'm wondering if this is to support small businesses/startups in the light of
Covid19. I know they amazon and google are already giving covid19 discounts to
companies but that won't cut it. I personally know so many startups who are
looking at their huge server bills and won't be able to survive for long if
that pricing continues. A failed startup is just one less customer for cloud
companies. So could this new pricing be to to keep existing small/medium
customers ? Just a thought. What do you guys are experiencing around ?

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benbro
Can someone recommend dedicated server providers with US, EU and Asia
locations? Hetzner looks great but they only have EU location.

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ksec
OVH?

I often wonder why Hetzner dont expand internationally.

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jgalt212
AWS and EC2 is probably a pretty good deal for high CPU, hi IO within the
cloud, but very low IO egress.

Monte Carlo simulations? PDE computations?

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pmiller2
Wouldn't a lot of that stuff be better done on GPU instances, even at a higher
per hour cost?

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

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fulafel
They're cutting only Intel instance-type pricing, a signal that AMD and ARM
instances are relatively more valuable?

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sb36
If I just purchased a few RIs 2 weeks ago, did I miss out on the savings, or
are they somehow retroactive?

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QuinnyPig
Reach out to your account manager.

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hmk99
The price reduction for M5 in US East is just 2%. Wish it was something that
was actually substantial.

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cyberferret
Noticed that too. We just upgraded all our servers from M3 to M5 instances,
but all in the us-east-1 region, so looks like we won't save a lot by
purchasing more reserved instances.

Noticed a _huge_ 20% reduction in some other areas though...

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dodobirdlord
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.

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cognaitiv
How does this compare to a general macroeconomic GDP forecast over the next 3
years?

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ashtonkem
I don’t know, but if AWS prices reflected economic reality they should reflect
the GDP hit and the shift from real world to digital services. It’s unclear
which one wins.

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neeraga
Still expensive

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lihan
Will Google Cloud follow up?

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techntoke
Google already did. They offer significant costs savings over AWS. Google also
allows unlimited egress to other Google services.

