In the early days of cloud service providers, they offered a handful of high-value services, all at great prices, making them cost-competitive with bare metal but much easier. That was then.
Things today are different. As cloud service providers have grown to become dominant, they now offer a vast, complicated tangle of services, microservices, control panels, etc., at prices that can spiral out of control if you are not constantly on top of them, making bare metal cheaper for many use cases.
> they offered a handful of high-value services, all at great prices, making them cost-competitive with bare metal but much easier
That was never the case for AWS, the point was never "We're cheap" but "We let you scale faster for a premium".
I first came across cloud services around 2010-2011 I think, when the company I worked at at the time started growing and we needed something better than shared hosting. AWS was brought up as a "fresh but expensive" alternative, and the CTO managed to convince the management that we needed AWS even if it was expensive, because it'll be a lot easier to tear up/down servers as we need it. Bandwidth costs I think was the most expensive part of the package, at least back then.
When I look at what performance per $ you get with AWS et al today, it looks the same, incredibly expensive for the performance you (don't) get. Better off with dedicated instances unless you team is lacking the basic skills of server management, or until the company really grown so it keeps being difficult dealing with the infrastructure, then hire a dedicated person and let them make the calls for what's next.
I'd agree that AWS never sold on being cheaper, but there is one particular way AWS could be cheaper and that is their approach to billing-by-the-unit with no fixed costs or minimum charges.
Being able to start small from a $1/mth bill without any fixed cost overheads is incredibly powerful for small startups.
If I wanted to store bytes in a DC it would cost $10k/mth by the time I was paying colo/ servers/ disks before I stored my first byte. Sure there wouldn't be any incremental costs for the second byte but thats a steep jump. S3 would have cost me $0.02. Being able to try technology and prove concepts at the product development stage is very powerful and why AWS became not just a vendor but a _technology partner_ for many companies.
> Being able to start small from a $1/mth bill without any fixed cost overheads is incredibly powerful for small startups.
Yes, no doubt about it. Initially AWS was mostly sold as "You never know when you might want to scale fast, imagine being featured in a newspaper and your servers can't handle the load, you need cloud for that!" to growing startups, and in that context it kind of makes sense, pay extra but at least be online.
But initially when you're small, or later when you're big and establish, other things make more sense. But yes, I agree that if you need to aggressively be able to scale up or down, cloud resources make sense to use for that, in addition to your base infrastructure.
But if AWS didn't have that anti-competitive data transfer fee that gets waived if your traffic goes to an internal server, why would you choose S3 vs a white-label storage vendor's similar offering?
> the point was never "We're cheap" but "We let you scale faster for a premium"
Actually, it was more like "Scale faster, easier, more reliably, with proven hardware and software infrastructure, operated by a proven organization, at a price point that is competitive with the investment you'd have to make to get comparable hardware, software, and organizational infrastructure." But that was then. Today, things are different. Cloud services have become giant hairballs of complexity, with plenty of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-by-default traps, at prices that can quickly spiral out of control if you're not on top of them.
Yep.
AWS is a money printer because it enables companies to make a lot more money without hiring multiple 200k a year engineers to manage infrastructure that comes with scale. And that is also considering that the company will actually have to find competent people to do the work.
With AWS, if you wanna scale, you just use your credit card without worrying about anything.
This. When AWS was 10 solid core services it made sense and was exciting. It’s now a bloated mess of 200+ services (many of which almost nobody uses) with all that complexity starting to create headaches and cracks.
AWS needs to stop trying to have a half-arsed solution to every possible use case and instead focus on doing a few basic things really well.
Imo the fact that an "AWS Certified Solutions Architect" is yet another AWS service/thing that is attainable, via an actual exam[0] for $300, is indicative of just how intentionally bloated the entire system has become.
[0] https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-solutions-arc...
"Embrace, extend, extinguish". It was a Microsoft saying, but it explains Amazon's approach to Linux. Once your customers are skilled in how to do things on your platform, using your specialized products, they won't price-comparison (or compare in any other way) to competing options. Whether those countless other "half-arsed solutions" actually make money is beside the point; as long as the customer has baked at least one into their tech stack, they can't easily leave.
Likely the best comment in the thread: Microsoft couldnt kill Linux. But AWS did it by adding itself as a layer on top of Linux and literally taking control of the web that Linux liberated by taking over the entire server space in the mid-2000s.
(Real question, not meant to be sarcastic or challenging!) -- What are the challenges in trying to use just the ~10 core services you want/need and ignoring the others? What problems do the others you don't use cause with this use case?
The early services were mostly self-contained.
A lot of newer stuff that actually scales (so Lightsail doesn't count) is entangled with "security", "observability" and "network" services. So if you just want to run EC2 + RDS today, you also have to deal with VPC, Subnets, IAM, KMS, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, etc.
Since security and logs are not optional, you have very limited choice.
Having that many required additional services means lots of hidden charges, complexity and problems. And you need a team if you're not doing small-scale stuff.
Costs have not dropped. Computing becomes cheaper over time, but AWS largely does not.
They used to release new ec2 sizes at the same price as the previous gen which made upgrading a no brainer. That stopped with m7 and doesn’t seem to be coming back.
Not sure what Amazon plans to do when the m6 hardware starts wearing out.
I don’t think I’ve seen a menu as hilariously bad as the AWS dashboard menu. No popup menu should consume the entire screen edge to edge. Just a wall of cryptic service names with ambiguous icons.
Word on the street is that Amazon leadership basically agrees with this and recognizes things have gotten off course. AWS is a small number of things that make money and then a whole bunch of slop and bloat.
AWS was mostly spared from yesterday’s big cuts but have been told to “watch this space” in the new year after re:Invent.
Anytime I have to go into the AWS control panel (which is often) I am immediately overwhelmed with a sense of dread. It's just the most bloated overcomplicated thing I could possibly imagine.
You're lucky not to have dealt with Azure and GCP control panels, in that case :-)
GCP is pretty good though, considering the complexity.
Azure is ... a different story...
I’ve heard people talk about using “raw AWS” (instead of a PaaS like Heroku) to “save money.”
It’s like dude if you think AWS is raw, sushi restaurants must really confuse you.
This is the right take - there is a huge variation in "value per dollar" across AWS services. The base ones that solve hard problems like durable persistent state can be very much worth it. They tend to be the older ones.
AFAICT no AWS service has ever had a price increase. This is nonsense.
Considering you get exponentially more compute/hardware for the same money every 2 years or so, they haven't been getting that much cheaper.
Every generation of CPU has cost more than the last one for years now.
Most years, AWS increases some prices:
https://github.com/SummitRoute/aws_breaking_changes/blob/mai...
Cloud has been generally getting cheaper if you take inflation into account. But hating AWS is the fad so...
Cloud is literally never cheaper, especially if you perform benchmarks.
Yes, EC2 might seem to be only 2.5 times the cost of storage... Except that, even if you buy the high speed storage, it's going to be 10x - 100x slower than bare metal. Which then means you can buy much slower drives, if you wanted to, and save a shit ton of money.
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...while on the other side, the "traditional" hosting/colocation providers feel the squeeze and have to offer more competitive prices to stay in business?