You Are Overpaying Jeff Bezos for Your Databases | Hacker News Reader

You Are Overpaying Jeff Bezos for Your Databases

ottertune.com

65 pointsbeoberha37 comments

This has got to be the most brazenly crass sales pitch I've ever seen.

"Do you hate billionaires? We've got the product for you!"

It got you to click, and to create engagement for this article, I wasn't aware of this product's existence and I likely wouldn't have been if not for the clickbait headline that got it to surface. That's a successful marketing endeavor right there.

How is the parent comment disagreeing with you?

Couldn't the author have just said "Amazon" and gotten a comparable clickthrough?

I would be surprised if that was the case. Picking on Bezos specifically does a better job at creating drama, than by pointing a finger at a giant faceless organization.

Bezos = Amazon

How many lay people know he's no longer CEO?

Marketing pitch doesn’t have to make sense to be successful. Andy is a marketing genius.

Andy is by far the coolest CS professor around.

Is it wrong? Jeff Bezos is suing SpaceX because he’s jealous. Your AWS dollars could literally contribute towards the demise of the American space renaissance.

It seemed kind of genius to me. The numbers look solid and easy to replicate. Talking about backup yachts is a lot more catchy than saying DBMS overprovisioning helps build fat margins for infrastructure providers.

(OK, the second formulation has a poetic ring to it for the accountants among us.)

The reason reason people overpay for large databases on RDS: RDS spend makes little difference to a lot of companies when the alternative is hosting it in-house. AWS provides multi-az failover and ability to add read-replicas with a click of a button. The support is also pretty good if you pay for the premium tier: I've had a RDS support member join major database migrations (might not happen for smaller companies, but we are talking about large spenders here).

I don't think he was saying RDS is overpriced...he was saying he's seen people use it inefficiently (e.g., still running the default DB config), which can raise RDS costs unnecessarily.

Anyone know why this post got flagged? I’m guessing it’s one of either the clickbaity ad-hominem nature that has inspired some less than desirable comments or the fact it’s an ad for a paid product. Regardless of either, I found the actual technical content extremely interesting and discussion-worthy.

Should also add a disclaimer that I work for a direct competitor to RDS and OtterTune would likely find similar issues with our product :)

Apparently we are overpaying Bezos for our bandwidth and storage costs, as well!

Just went hunting for a better price on bandwidth the other day and was blown away by what hetzner cloud has to offer. (20TB free bandwidth per month, with an extra TB charged at 1.19 EUR ($1.38 USD) or $0.00138/GB.

AWS charges $0.05/GB ... How/why is AWS >32x more expensive?

The aws and other cloud vendors markup on bandwidth is probably at least 50x. It is their moat. If they lower it their big spenders like snowflake will leave for their own datacenters

I don't get it. How is a huge markup on a commodity product their "moat" or protection against clients leaving?

I am one of their clients and I am leaving due to it.

Once you are in the roach motel the path of least resistance is to buy other services from AWS rather than the competitors because of the egress charges. It is completely anticompetitive and I expect even the toothless US antitrust authorities will crack down on that.

That Hetzner offer is like 5 years old now. If you buy one of their recent offerings, bandwidth is unmetered now. You can easily send around 150TB/month at no extra cost with their offers.

OVH can get you unmetered servers with 1-3gbit/s for 100-400 USD/month as well. That's around 500TB/month after accounting for how much you actually get.

Online.net is similarly priced.

The list goes on.

It's unmetered for dedicated, pay as you go for cloud iirc.

I am very happy with AWS Aurora PostgreSQL. I feel safe that my company's data is kept there, and the surrounding UX and tooling is to my satisfaction.

I also don't see the point of mentioning Jeff Bezos's other investments. They are not connected to the price and performance characteristics of AWS databases.

2/3 of Amazon’s market cap is AWS alone, and thus 2/3 of Bezos’ wealth. Blue Origin isn’t even a rounding error.

Something interesting that wasn't mentioned in this article, but was mentioned in the other Ottertune blog article [0] is that significant performance improvements can be achieved with the help of open-source tools like MySQLTuner [1].

[0] https://ottertune.com/blog/benchmark-using-machine-learning-...

[1] https://github.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl

This looks useful, but I'm hesitant to give a third party access to my production databases. What assurances do I have in regard to the safety of this tool and whether or not it will access my client's secure data?

Yo. It's Andy@OtterTune here.

OtterTune does not need to access user tables or view queries (nor do we want to). OtterTune only collects runtime metrics from the database (e.g., InnoDB stats, pg_stat_database) and CloudWatch. These performance counters are enough of a signal to tell how your application uses the database and how optimize the system accordingly.

Two of our major deployments that we can talk about were at a French bank and Booking.com, both of which are in Europe. Their infosec people looked at what we were sending to our service and said that were no GDPR issues.

The original motivation of the OtterTune project started because when I was a grad student I had trouble getting real workloads and data sets for my experiments. So I decided to purposely work on a database optimization tool that did not need access to the things that you are worried about when I started a new professor.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Haha, nope we're overpaying Ellison for our databases.

This guy too? Or did he sell all his Oracle stock? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinod_Khosla#Martin's_Beach_...

Thought he made all his money being on Tesla’s board.

Oh, only 12 billion.

https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-cofounder-larry-ellis...

That's so cool! Hope they can support GCP soon!

I'm not sure why people keep bringing up Jeff Bezos when he's not longer CEO at Amazon. Sure he has a vested stake in the company but it's still an annoying statement.

I'd assume he's still the plurality shareholder.

The money you spend goes to the owners, not the employees, regardless of how well the employees are paid

Still a major stockholder

So which cloud vendor isn’t sticking it to us?

Cloudflare.

Equinix metal pricing is considerably cheaper but you won’t find managed services there so gotta do everything yourself. The cloud vendors aren’t sticking it to you - they’re taking advantage of orgs unwillingness and incompetence to run their own infra and I can’t blame them

Sure. And there are customer friendly ways to do this, and customer unfriendly ways to do this.

I am unwilling to build my own car. (And not competent enough) Some car companies try to abuse that asymmetry. Others don’t.

Using your own analogy car repair costs arm and leg with the dealer vs diy (if you know how and have access to tools). So not that different from cloud providers really

anyone else seeing strange sideways zeroes on some of their graphics?

guess table folk are fans of pivots :^)

F*ck you dick-rocket money doesn't just make itself.

I mean, I suppose his actually mostly does.

Never mind.

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