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Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

Are there any new players in this space? Between AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, it seems like any attempt at cloud computing infrastructure gets eaten up and you're forced into these price hikes from this triopoly

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This says it aims to track price changes, but I don't see any actually mentioned. I'm extremely wary of locking into these companies, and there are others - Linode, Vultr, Digital Ocean to name a few that give them some competition at least.

Unlike that other hyperscaler, AWS is very aware that raising prices erodes customer trust faster than deprecating the new chat app they forced on you. I am certain they’re never going to do that.

As for the other companies you mention, they don’t give the hyperscalers any serious competition. Even some of the (so called) hyperscalers are unable to compete with the other hyperscalers.

From my perspective, they're all hyperscale for whatever that's worth. It seems like we may be hitting the end of Moore's law (actually more or less on schedule) and so I wonder how these cloud companies would keep pushing costs down and lowering or even keeping prices flat. If power and engineering and hardware costs keep increasing, then at some point something has to give, though I suppose Amazon does have large margins they could potentially erode first.

I miss just working on infrastructure and not having to try and guess at an economic analysis of your suppliers to try and keep from getting crushed like an unnoticed insect on the boot of one of these companies, but perhaps it was never that simple - I was just young and inexperienced.

It used to be that other people used to manage the “business” aspects of the job. Cloud forces that management down level.

I don't think the end of moore's law means no reduction in prices though. A lot (most) of the cost of the chips is really the capital cost of building a new x nanometre fabs and the chip design etc. If they can be used for longer (as new smaller processes are taking longer and longer) it will still result in cost reductions, hopefully.

I've also been lead to believe that silicon wafers of appropriate purity are enormously expensive as well, so packing more transistors per unit was important for the economics there. Nevertheless, you're correct that cost pressures will probably lead to other ways of finding efficiencies. Still, it feels like the fun part of those curves are behind us these days.

I don’t think AWS has ever increased prices.

It has, on RDS.

Do you have a link? I didn't find anything like that with a quick search, though I don't necessarily know what I'm looking for.

I did see some complaints about RDS's pricing not falling commensurate with the prices of the underlying instances. Those are legitimate complaints, but they aren't really price increases.

Oracle, Alibaba, Tencent, IBM, etc.

Google has raised prices but has AWS?

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