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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Here's the simple thing to know about AWS. They sell two great products (EC2 and S3) below market value so that you get locked in and their sales teams can upsell you on everything else. If you are a customer and are tempted to try out their alphabet soup of managed services because it all seems so convenient – don't.

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> below market value

Unless you would like your data to egress from an AWS datacenter, in which case they are a very, very long way above market value.

> two great products

RDS is also pretty great, and KMS is a pretty good way to store a private key per environment.

EC2 sold below market rate ? S3 I could argue somehow (unconvincingly). But what's the argument for EC2 ?

Who’s actually paying list price?

Anyone with more cash than sense, which is a lot of people. Every business I've worked for hooked up a credit card to AWS and never asked questions, until millions of wasted dollars later. Gotta love daddy corps with billions in reserve, and VC money that pours in like rain. I've been rebuffed multiple times trying to get them to buy SPs and RIs.

Everybody who isn’t big enough to have an EDP in place.

Even then, you give some of the discount back as AWS Enterprise Support charges :)

The majority of the customers.

(That majority of the customers might stand for less than the turnover of the minority that enjoys discounts. But that does not help you if you belong to the majority.)

Lots of competitors have S3 equivalents with complete coverage of the S3 API interface; it's a pure commodity at this point.

Lots of comments about EC2's price. My personal experience is that we do not just pay for the computing power of EC2 but the productivity it offers: it's just magical that one can launch an availability group across multiple zones, set up its autoscaling rules, and let it run wild. Netflix used to build its platform on top of EC2s, and the result was that a single engineer can carry a pager for multiple services 24x7, stateful included, and still enjoyed great work-life balance. It's also amazing how hard it is for companies to replicate their own EC2 in their own data centers.

EC2? It has not been under market value for a decade now. It used to take 12-24 months of on demand pricing to buy the hardware outright in the 00s. Today it's under 6 months for every instance type. With GPU instances being measured in weeks.

S3? Laughs in egress costs.

AWS considered harmful.

Speaking great products, DynamoDB is pretty good too, to the point that there's no open-source equivalent to it yet. Cassandra probably comes the closest, but it does not have true GSIs, no cross-table transactions, no easy and robust CDCs like DynamoDB streams, and its CAS is dog slow.

SQS is great too. To many people it's reliable and durable, and implements a pretty robust competitive consumer pattern.

SQS, SNS and Lambda are great as well

What else is left?

DynamoDB

Those all do what they say on the tin (and do it well enough), but the vendor lockin is very real.

We LOVE Lambda and SQS.

Okay! Apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us!?

Gotta love Step Functions, Lambda, and also Kinesis Firehose!

... ?

Compared to Hetzner? Come on.

Amazon just prices S3 and EC2 at not-insane rates because they shadow charge you for I/O and network traffic at 10x a competitive rate, things that people don't actually look at when evaluating cloud providers.

SES is imo their top tier service!

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