[mgaunard]

Pricing in AWS is heavily dependent on whether you reserve the instance and for how long.

In my experience, if you reserve a bare metal instance for 3 years (which is the biggest discount), it costs 2 times the price of buying it outright.

I'm surprised to hear about the numbers from the video being way different, but then, it's a video, so I didn't watch it and can't tell if he did use the correct pricing.

[parchley]

You seem to insinuate that the correct pricing is using a 3 year commitment. That seems very much not logical to me considering the original promise of the cloud to be flexible, and to scale up and down on demand.

[jauntywundrkind]

You're also getting pretty stale instances by the end of the 3 years.

At two difference companies, I've seen a big batch of committed instances finally go off contract, and we replaced them with more modern instances that improved performance significantly while not costing us anything more or even letting us shrink the pool, saving us money.

It's a pain, but auto scaling groups with a couple different spot instance types in it seems to be quasi necessary for getting an ok aws compute value.

[mgaunard]

You'd have the same problem if you bought your own hardware. You don't throw it away and replace it until it's been amortized.

[mgaunard]

Elasticity is very expensive, in practice people only use it for one-off jobs, preferably using the cheaper unreliable "spot" instances (meaning the job must support being partially re-run to recover, which implies a complex job splitting and batching platform).

For traditional, always-on servers, you should reserve them for 3 years. You still have the ability to scale up, just not down. You can always go hybrid if you don't know what your baseline usage is.

[hhh]

Should you be designing for a single server to exist for 3 years when you have such elastic compute? Why not design for living on spot instances and get savings lower than hetzner with better performance? What about floating savings plans? There’s a ton left on the table here just to say ‘aws bad’ for some views

[tstrimple]

The biggest cloud detractors are often the most ignorant about how to run things effectively in the cloud. They try to use the same patterns that they have used for the last 20 years on-prem and are all confused as to why it's more expensive. It's the exact same tired arguments over and over again. They don't want to learn how to do things in a new way.