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Comment by jayonsoftware | Hacker News Reader

2 GB / 1 vCPU about $20. On DO you can get 4 GB / 2 vCPUs plus 80 GB storage and 4 TB on Transfer for $20. (Same with linode.com, upcloud.com)

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In the same keynote this was announced, they said that one of their regions has reached nearly 5 Pbps of inter-AZ network capacity. They also poked at Google for using phrasing like "regions usually have independent cooling and power control planes". They clarified a common misconception: Regions aren't single datacenters, nor are AZs single data centers, and at least one of their AZs (probably a us-east-1 AZ) has fourteen datacenters.

If you want the Cheapest, go to DigitalOcean. AWS is engineering the Best. Why HN has this obsession with quibbling over a couple dollars while hosting their hobby projects on the same cloud provider that Epic Games and Netflix pay hundreds of millions of dollars to for their massive workloads, I'll have no idea. It's not made for you.

Amazon can get on stage and throw valid infrastructure resiliency complaints at Google. They can't do the same thing against DigitalOcean or Linode, because that'd be like Usain Bolt making fun of a toddler's quarter mile time.

Amazon could also pick on someone their own size. Oracle's annual revenue is more than double AWS at 40B a year. If you look at on-prem enterprise IT, or Azure you'll find competitors much closer to AWS with very high performance, resilience, and security guarantees. In fact, Azure is growing much faster than AWS and Microsoft has a huge advantage in many of the industries that AWS is lagging in.

AWS is a leader in "running a web app at scale". But when it comes to Healthcare, Finance, Government, Education, Telecommunications, etc, they are small fish in a big pond.

AWS by itself will be the size of Oracle in fiscal 2020. They'll do $24-$25 billion in sales for 2018. Oracle's business hasn't expanded in years: sales in 2015 were $38b, and that's still their approximate annualized sales figure today. AWS is ~64% the size of Oracle. In 2019 they'll be 85% the size of Oracle.

So there you have Oracle with essentially zero growth and a failed cloud business that is not only running from behind, it's a disaster. Things are so bad, Oracle has begun trying to hide their cloud numbers when they report.

Simultaneously, Oracle's balance sheet is turning into a toxic wasteland. Net tangible assets have gone from positive $6 billion to negative $12 billion in just three quarters. They're now spending the equivalent of ~22% of their net profit on debt interest alone. Ellison will have to try to turn to another very large acquisition soon to bail out the ship that is about to sink. As the large cloud competitors get far larger in the next few years, they're going to begin not just robbing Oracle of growth but taking their existing business away. The scale is at a point where for AWS and Azure to double in size again (guaranteed to happen), Oracle is going to lose big.

> If you want the Cheapest, go to DigitalOcean.

I switched off of DO after they took my droplet offline because it was getting DDoS'd. I understand they want to protect their network and other customers becoming collateral damage, but it was still annoying. My little node was handling the attack just fine until DO kicked it off.

EDIT: And I've heard of DO customers getting their droplets taken offline for being DDoS'd even when they weren't under attack and were simply receiving a lot of traffic from reddit or something.

I remember once someone saying something along the lines of (and I'm paraphrasing) "Amazon aren't the cheapest retailer out there, but they want you to believe they are".

It's a similar situation with AWS. They're not /cheap,/ and they're not /cheaper/ than a lot of alternatives. The advantage of AWS is flexibility and depth of tooling, not price, though a lot of people are under the general impression that "it's cheaper on AWS".

THIS. I gound out the hard way. Im back on linode.

You realize now the power of branding, cult personality, marketing, get foreign cops to beat foreign workers at warehouse....sure is hel--i shit you not my book atrived from Amazon.ca

“It's cheaper on AWS” really depends on where you're starting from, too. If you actually need more than, say, a bare Linux box it's usually hard to even start collecting the staff time + costs for the equivalent enterprise environment with network infrastructure, monitoring, access management and audit logging, the various fault-tolerance / recovery options, etc.

It requires care to do a comparison which actually measures the subset of features which you use — I've seen the other side of that where someone justified dropping a ton of cash on a particular option based on a specific feature but, jumping ahead a few years, never ended up using that due to performance/stability/security issues.

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