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.
Of course these don’t scale dynamically. And you don’t just create copied of the servers. And they don’t have 100 security certifications like Azure/AWS. And no data centers in every jurisdiction.
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.
It is called service for a reason.
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.
Well this is not true. I don't think Azure is much cheaper in that regard. In reality, the big clouds are watching each other very closely. Do you have data other than anecdote evidence?
Also if you are big enough, you can negotiate better deal with AWS separately, and I believe that is the norm.
Disclaimer: I worked at AWS before.
Why, yes. Take Hetzner for example. With their Hetzner cloud offering you get, say, 1vCPU with 2GB of RAM and 2TB of traffic for 3€/month. For an instance with 2vCPUs yo pay about 4.15€.
For an equivalent EC2 instance (t3.small) you pay about 5x the price, and you still need to pay additional costs such as egress charges.
Heck, with Hetzner you can spend less than 50€/month and get a dedicated box with 64GB of RAM and 4 real cores with free unlimited traffic over a dedicated 1Gb connection.
It isn't even up for debate: AWS price-gouges their customers. Unless you have a very particular need to deploy an application globally, it's very hard to defend paying AWS's cost.
No it isn't. Hetzner provides full blown linux instances with 2GB of RAM, while the Ligthsail instance type you're trying to compare has a barely workable 512MB of RAM. That's the equivalent of a meager Orange Pi Zero.
The Lightsail instance type that is equivalent to Hetzner's 4€/month instance is sold for 20€/month.
Some companies are making billions of dollars, that’s why we see so much content about the cloud and very few about building your own cloud with dedicated providers, which by the way handle electricity, network and basic hardware maintenance for pennies compared to cloud guys. They even have some basic managed services like backups, S3-compatible storage etc. these days.
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).
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.
tldr; The number "512" when talked about in the context of RAM is assumed to be measured in MB, but 512 GB is also a less-commonly-encountered amount of RAM. :)
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.
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.
SLC NAND SSD could be had for $0.4/GB, I failed to see why DRAM should be priced at 10x higher.
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
So you can just get somewhere between 5 to 7 of those instances for the price you're paying for your single EC2 instance.