AWS EC2 General Price Cut

[rb808]

Buying your own Physical hardware is so cheap now its crazy. A commodity Ryzen 16 vCPU box is about the same price as 2 months rent on EC2.

I get maintenance, electricity and bandwidth isn't free but I honestly thought cloud server prices would be much lower by now. No wonder AWS is making huge profits.

[jpalomaki]

Check the prices for example on Hezner or some other company which provides dedicated boxes. They are totally different from big cloud. Like 6 cores and 256GB memory for 150€/month (one older server I have there).

Of course these don’t scale dynamically. And you don’t just create copied of the servers. And they don’t have 100 security certifications like Azure/AWS. And no data centers in every jurisdiction.

[tanilama]

AWS is so much more than just hardware

It is called service for a reason.

[DmitryOlshansky]

It’s buy vs build but with people being routinely misled about how much it costs to build and the fact that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Some companies are making billions of dollars, that’s why we see so much content about the cloud and very few about building your own cloud with dedicated providers, which by the way handle electricity, network and basic hardware maintenance for pennies compared to cloud guys. They even have some basic managed services like backups, S3-compatible storage etc. these days.

[kilbuz]

For me, not having to worry about the "where" and "how" related to physical placement and connection of that Ryzen box is worth the premium and then some.

[phamilton]

Could someone a little more familiar with buying their own hardware tell me how much hardware equivalent to a c5.12xlarge (48 cores, 96 GB) would cost?

Spot prices are around $0.80/hr, which puts total compute cost at $7k/yr.

On demand is $2.04/hr ($17k/yr), reserved is 1.20/hr ($10k/yr).

[karterk]

PR speak aside, it looks like they are trying to get people to switch to certain regions, perhaps which are not popular with lot of idle machines? The popular locations like Oregon and Virginia don't have much discounts to offer.

[idunno246]

for the US regions, california is already ~25% more expensive, so this just reduces the difference

[ehsankia]

Makes sense, trying to mixmax their load by adjusting pricing for people who care less about region and more about cost.

[TechBro8615]

Are they still extorting customers by price gouging bandwidth? Maybe one day I’ll wake up to news they’ve decided to charge for capacity instead of transfer.

[sixdimensional]

Actually, I do genuinely wonder if some day this will be seen as anticompetitive behavior (a form of lock-in via higher than reasonable egress fees).

[abtinf]

> Are they still extorting customers...

That is a contradiction in terms.

According to the OED:

Extort means to "obtain (something) by force, threats, or other unfair means."

Customer means "a person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or business"

Thus, extortion is a coercive relationship--we call the target of extortion a victim, not a customer.

The relationship of a vendor and customer is voluntary.

[lowdose]

And traffic bandwidth?

I know it is not Christmas yet but it would be great if those prices trend to marginal cost for the sake of innovation.

[uyuioi]

Have traffic prices even moved in years? It’s such a blatant ripoff.

[thinkingkong]

Dont be silly.

[SteveNuts]

I'm waiting for the day they announce bandwidth price cuts

[jread]

AWS Lightsail is a possible workaround for bandwidth heavy simple workloads. The smallest $3.50/mo instance (t2.nano behind the scenes), comes with 1TB outbound bandwidth - equivalent of about $90 for the same in EC2 excluding the instance cost, and bundled bandwidth increases for larger types.

[doctorfoo]

this. the only way I can make profit with my web service is by using a third party low budget CDN as a caching layer. Even with that, S3 data transfer remains my biggest cost. if I could spare the time, I'd make a custom caching layer so that S3 is never hit at all except for upload, and is used only for disaster recovery.

[wolco]

"The price reduction you receive, depends on the region you choose, whether you take out a 1 or 3 year term and finally the instance family you commit to in your agreement. Price reductions vary from between 1% to a massive 18% on what you were previously paying"

18% reductions for 1 year terms in Europe.

8% in mnt US region for 1 year term. No savings elsewhere.

Some prices reductions elsewhere in the world.

[toredash]

This is far from a general price cut. It's a price cut only of you are willing to commit to long term usage.

[unexaminedlife]

I'm holding out for a better price on GPU instances (for parallel processing).

My 'back of the napkin' calculations indicate it would take very little time for it to pay for itself by purchasing your own NVIDIA GPU(s) and running them from a colo.

Especially if your requirements are for the instance(s) to run 24x7.

[ramraj07]

Why would they ever be not the case ? If you ignore sysadmin costs AWS is always more expensive (even when reserved for three years) than any machine you maintain yourself

[mhh__]

Isn't the whole point of cloud that you don't own the machines? The calculus probably isn't as good when you factor in support, maintenance, and power costs right?

[chrisseaton]

Can you actually buy GPUs now? An advantage of Amazon in the past was that they were actually available there, where they weren’t available to buy in practice.

[boynamedsue]

No change in pricing for GP2 in six years.

[infogulch]

Hmm, given the uneven reductions between regions, I wonder if this is more of a move to balance (and increase) demand so that it more closely matches their supply. So then I guess the question is: why do they have excess supply?

[lawrenceyan]

Competing cloud service providers gouging away at what used to be an AWS monopoly that unfortunately for Amazon, no longer exists.

[ateevchopra]

I'm wondering if this is to support small businesses/startups in the light of Covid19. I know they amazon and google are already giving covid19 discounts to companies but that won't cut it. I personally know so many startups who are looking at their huge server bills and won't be able to survive for long if that pricing continues. A failed startup is just one less customer for cloud companies. So could this new pricing be to to keep existing small/medium customers ? Just a thought. What do you guys are experiencing around ?

[benbro]

Can someone recommend dedicated server providers with US, EU and Asia locations? Hetzner looks great but they only have EU location.

[ksec]

OVH?

I often wonder why Hetzner dont expand internationally.

[jgalt212]

AWS and EC2 is probably a pretty good deal for high CPU, hi IO within the cloud, but very low IO egress.

Monte Carlo simulations? PDE computations?

[User23]

This raises a good point. Would anyone be willing to give some examples of use cases where egress to cloudfront or ec2 isn't viable? Most useful computations I can think of involve consuming large amounts of data and simplifying it to some easily digestible result. Media streaming is the first and only example that comes to mind, but I'm sure there must be others.

[pmiller2]

Wouldn't a lot of that stuff be better done on GPU instances, even at a higher per hour cost?

[fulafel]

They're cutting only Intel instance-type pricing, a signal that AMD and ARM instances are relatively more valuable?

[sb36]

If I just purchased a few RIs 2 weeks ago, did I miss out on the savings, or are they somehow retroactive?

[QuinnyPig]

Reach out to your account manager.

[hmk99]

The price reduction for M5 in US East is just 2%. Wish it was something that was actually substantial.

[cyberferret]

Noticed that too. We just upgraded all our servers from M3 to M5 instances, but all in the us-east-1 region, so looks like we won't save a lot by purchasing more reserved instances.

Noticed a huge 20% reduction in some other areas though...

[cognaitiv]

How does this compare to a general macroeconomic GDP forecast over the next 3 years?

[ashtonkem]

I don’t know, but if AWS prices reflected economic reality they should reflect the GDP hit and the shift from real world to digital services. It’s unclear which one wins.

[neeraga]

Still expensive