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Comment by joefourier | Hacker News Reader

AWS is extremely overpriced for nearly every service. I don’t know why anyone else outside of startups with VC money to burn or bigcos that need the “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” guarantee would use them. You’re better off with Lambdalabs or others which charge only $1.1/h per A100.

Also that is a 8xA100 system as others have noted, but it is the 40GB one which can be found on eBay for as low as $3k if you go with the SXM4 one (although the price of supporting components may vary) or $5k for the PCI-e version.

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You pay for the system not the gpu with AWS.

It's absolutely worth the money when you look at the whole picture. Also lambda labs never has availability. I actually can schedule a distributed cluster on AWS.

> It's absolutely worth the money when you look at the whole picture.

That highly depends on many things. If you run a business with a relatively steady load that doesn't need to scale quickly multiple times per day, AWS is definitely not for you. Take Let's Encrypt[1] as an example. Just because cloud is the hype doesn't mean it's always worth it.

Edit: Or a personal experience: I had a customer that insisted on building their website on AWS. They weren't expecting high traffic loads and didn't need high availability, so I suggested to just use a VPS for $50 a month. They wanted to go the AWS route. Now their website is super scalable with all the cool buzzwords and it costs them $400 a month to run. Great! And in addition, the whole setup is way more complex to maintain since it's built on AWS instead of just a simple website with a database and some cache.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37536103

We built a tool for lambda labs and other clouds that launches a specific instance whenever it becomes available and notifies you. We poll Lambda Labs for availability every 3 seconds. Would this be something that would be useful for you?

There are only two services that are dirt cheap and way too reliable, useful.That's S3 and SQS. Rest can get very expensive very soon.

You can build a lot of stuff on top of these two.

Even for S3 while the storage is dirt cheap they still have exorbitant bandwidth pricing.

Oh yes. You're right.

S3 is not dirt cheap. Bandwidth is ludicrously expensive.

> AWS is extremely overpriced for nearly every service

S3 and EC2 are priced very competitively.

Your pricing only matters if you have availability.

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