Software for bare metal is catching up - you can buy couple of dedicated servers, install something like Kubernetes and will be shaking your head in disbelief how much you over paid for AWS.
AWS is not a virtual machine company. Virtual machines are just one of its offering. At AWS you must architect your software to use other AWS services as much as possible, and spin up minimum count of virtual machines, only when you really need it. Only in that way you pay really what you use and in most cases you will see that the final cost is cheaper than any other infrastructure.
This applies to the most of companies at small and medium scale. If you are at huge scale it might not apply to you.
Until you need to add another server, or 10 or 100... Not to mention it's another set of skills you need to have. It's a tradeoff. (I'm not talking about "we may need 100 servers next year because we'll have all this traction by then" -- I'm talking about "our load is growing at 1.5x every month or next month we need X capacity")
I just finished booting up two new clusters with 5 and 15 nodes, respectively and cycled them a couple of times after making changes to the AMI. The clusters are in ASGs and will scale based on resource usage. I can't do that with bare metal.
You can rent them too, like here : https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/ (not affiliated, would like to know of other decent hosts too) - I think this is the best of both worlds (don't need to deal with HW, getting bare mettal perf and reasonable prices)
DockerCloud allows you to deploy to AWS/DigitalOcean. It is server hosting agnostic. That is if the Ocean is cheaper, you can simply switch from the Amazon.
This will be a deal breaker in the future.
Amazon is being disrupted with the same tech it used for disrupting the other players.
Yeah. Love it. It's way cheaper than AWS because of automatic discounting if you use it for a full month. Performance, boot up time & the dashboard UI/UX is better. (Regarding performance and boot up time, my experience is a bit outdated so things might have changed)
Downside: Some documentation (stackdriver for ex) can be really confusing. Also for opening up port 80 firewall rule wasn't enough, you had to apply the http label (Haven't tested this recently)
I'm very happy with them and believe it is cheaper, although it's hard to compare considering the explosion of services on both platforms. I initially chose them because I/O performance on gce was ahead by about factor 10 (may have been workload-specific, may have changed – this was about a year ago, may only apply to the smaller machine types with SSD I tested).
I've also had a much easier time getting started, but my AWS experience may be out of date now. But both the web UI as well as the cli client are excellent.
I also prefer google because of their excellent contributions to OSS, their advocacy for an open internet, their lack of sweatshop-warehouses, and their investments in hard problems. (and I know altruism may not be the motive, but still...)
honestly , the new prices starts from December/1 and there's only 5% price drop for US datacenters. 20-25% mostly for Singapore and Frankfurt where the original price was higher on that 20-25%.
There are also these guys - Packet: https://www.packet.net/ They have a lots of what you need from "cloud", bare metal servers and very competitive prices (even comparing to hetzner)
Asking as an ignorant foreigner: Does anyone know what makes us-west more expensive than us-east? Is it just land or electricity prices or something like that?
elcct|9 years ago
cagataygurturk|9 years ago
This applies to the most of companies at small and medium scale. If you are at huge scale it might not apply to you.
TheHydroImpulse|9 years ago
I just finished booting up two new clusters with 5 and 15 nodes, respectively and cycled them a couple of times after making changes to the AMI. The clusters are in ASGs and will scale based on resource usage. I can't do that with bare metal.
rubber_duck|9 years ago
You can rent them too, like here : https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/ (not affiliated, would like to know of other decent hosts too) - I think this is the best of both worlds (don't need to deal with HW, getting bare mettal perf and reasonable prices)
0xmohit|9 years ago
csomar|9 years ago
This will be a deal breaker in the future.
Amazon is being disrupted with the same tech it used for disrupting the other players.
riprowan|9 years ago
codecamper|9 years ago
boundlessdreamz|9 years ago
Downside: Some documentation (stackdriver for ex) can be really confusing. Also for opening up port 80 firewall rule wasn't enough, you had to apply the http label (Haven't tested this recently)
matt4077|9 years ago
I've also had a much easier time getting started, but my AWS experience may be out of date now. But both the web UI as well as the cli client are excellent.
I also prefer google because of their excellent contributions to OSS, their advocacy for an open internet, their lack of sweatshop-warehouses, and their investments in hard problems. (and I know altruism may not be the motive, but still...)
radimm|9 years ago
Overall it's much easier to predict than AWS. There are some aspects where documentation could be better. And obviously no managed Postgresql.
merb|9 years ago
user5994461|9 years ago
They're not even playing in the same league.
rmykhajliw|9 years ago
cromantin|9 years ago
wjoe|9 years ago
user5994461|9 years ago
nodesocket|9 years ago
gtsteve|9 years ago
virtuallynathan|9 years ago
The regions listed were just examples. Check back Dec 1.