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Comment by throwawaysed | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people are in denial that there isn't using some magic efficiency to cloud services that other datacenters don't have. Primary cost savings on cloud VM's is from overprovisioning. The more abstracted away the service is from the hardware, the more they can overprovision without customers noticing.

The 50%+ profit margins have to be coming from somewhere. AWS is not made of magic, it's made from largely the same PC parts you buy on newegg

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This is just factually incorrect. AWS hard partitions all instance types, except T2 (which are overcommitted, and clearly advertised as such: "burstable").

So, if you provision an x1.32xlarge with 128 vCPU and 1.92TB of RAM, you get a single, dedicated host with that much CPU and memory. Nobody else gets it - it's dedicated to you 100%.

The profit AWS is making is purely due to datacenter efficiency and being able to automate their operations at scale.

The instant you wrote "128vCPU" you undermined your own argument.

What is a vCPU?

It's early defined in the docs. The machine also has a physical core count that is yours.

There is nothing stopping Amazon from having a machine that is double that config, and renting you half of it, however.

As soon as 32GB DIMMs drop enough in price, I would expect them to do exactly that. You can configure a Dell R930 with e7 Haswell CPUs online, if you want to double-check it. Not sure if the R930 can go to 8 CPUs (which the e7 Haswells CPUs support).

But as soon as they double the size of the machine there is no reason for them to not have an instance type that is the size of the machine minus the host layer.

>The profit AWS is making is purely due to datacenter efficiency and being able to automate their operations at scale.

That's what they want you to think, but a lot of it comes in the form of ripping you off for bandwidth to actually get data out of EC2.

I've been with AWS for about 10 years now on a number of projects. Bandwidth pricing has always been my major gripe. Almost everything else I consider fairly priced for what I get and how hands-off I get to be.

> The 50%+ profit margins

Charge more than what it costs you. That's how to make money.

well to be honest its because it sounds cool, its in the news, and so how can such proposals be wrong. Seriously the number of times I heard "the cloud" bandied about by people who have continuously failed or were "thwarted" by people who knew better is getting silly. I am sure it happens in other places but too many think it makes them look smart to suggest it.

if anything its a diversion from fixing what is broke or even admitting to it within some organizations

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