[HN Gopher] Cloud Provider Performance Comparison - Perl and More
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       Cloud Provider Performance Comparison - Perl and More
        
       Author : mfontani
       Score  : 59 points
       Date   : 2022-03-07 14:44 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blogs.perl.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blogs.perl.org)
        
       | hughrr wrote:
       | So what this tells me is to buy a Mac mini and throw it in the
       | corner of the office.
        
         | deadmutex wrote:
         | I think part of the benefit you get from cloud is that if you
         | only need 5 machines on the weekdays, but 10 machines on the
         | weekends, you can easily scale up and down (instead of running
         | and managing 10 machines). Another is reliability. It is not
         | uncommon to have AWS/GCP instances stay on for years (since the
         | underlying hardware is abstracted way), etc.
         | 
         | If you don't care about that, then the balances changes. If
         | you're OK with 1 on prem server, you can just buy a AMD or
         | Intel workstation, and tweak the hardware config (e.g. RAM,
         | kernel, software, etc.), BIOS to your liking.
        
           | jdvh wrote:
           | The cloud is so much more expensive than dedicated that you
           | need far greater than 2x spikes in usage to make it
           | worthwhile. For instance a video game that suddenly goes
           | viral and you need to scale up 1000x overnight.
           | 
           | All cloud providers have pretty poor uptime records. Unless
           | you set up multiple geo zones (extra complexity) your app
           | will go down when aws-east does.
        
             | bushbaba wrote:
             | It's relatively easy to run 10 machines. It's harder to run
             | 100 machines. Even harder at 1000 machines. Then you start
             | talking about 10,000+ machines and you're talking about a
             | lot of people process & logistics, taking up your
             | organizations time.
             | 
             | Then you talk about the bureaucracy an organization might
             | have to provision new machines, or provide elasticity, and
             | the hinderance it has on your development velocity.
             | 
             | It's at this scale the benefits of cloud really shine. The
             | improvement to your development velocity, the shift from
             | large CAPEX purchases to monthly opex, and the ease at
             | which you can shift infrastructure direction.
             | 
             | It's similar to why a lot of businesses rent office space
             | vs buying it outright. Or why you might pay for Bon Appetit
             | to manage your cafeterias vs doing it yourself.
        
               | marcosdumay wrote:
               | The CAPEX vs. OPEX argument does really not hold water.
               | Scalable clouds are 100s to 1000s of times more expensive
               | than using your own hardware. That's a pretty absurd ROI
               | to get from a loan, even on high-interest economies.
               | 
               | Also renting non-scalable hardware is a perfectly viable
               | option with costs more similar to owning it. Renting non-
               | scalable hardware makes the same change from CAPEX into
               | OPEX.
        
               | hughrr wrote:
               | Really most organisations that end up in the cloud don't
               | need elasticity. I have worked with a number of companies
               | and they all run entirely static sized clusters. They
               | don't even benefit from scaling down the cluster out of
               | peak hours because their load is that small.
        
             | hughrr wrote:
             | This. We pay $90k/yr just for an EC2 DB instance when the
             | hardware would have cost us $50k for 3 years including the
             | rack to stick it in and the transit.
             | 
             | It should be hybrid but everyone is busy sucking dick in
             | the AWS fashion show.
        
               | vlovich123 wrote:
               | It's because of how accounting works (opex vs capex). I
               | don't know if there are tax reasons but a major reason
               | opex is preferred to capex is that the former is tied
               | directly to cash flows. Cash flows are the lifeblood of a
               | business being profitable and makes it easy to balance
               | costs and revenues whereas capex is a long term
               | investment (ties up your capital).
               | 
               | There are secondary order effects going on here to
               | explain this. Also, in your example the 50k number isn't
               | including the rack space rental costs, technicians to
               | maintain the hardware, and OPs people to keep the
               | deployed software running (software updates etc).
        
               | hughrr wrote:
               | There's no tax or cash flow reason here. We have full
               | autonomy and it's a fraction of our revenue and profit.
               | 
               | Rack space is included in my pricing there. As for
               | technicians, we still have to employ the same number of
               | people. Instead of having 2x DC techs and 2x DBAs we now
               | have 4x devops engineers and 2x DBAs.
               | 
               | There is no saving here for us.
               | 
               | To note we have 12 of these nodes.
        
               | getcrunk wrote:
               | Well there you have it, if money isn't really an issue,
               | the cliche works well, no one got fired for suggesting
               | the cloud.
        
               | getcrunk wrote:
               | The way I look at it, try to go server less (jamstack)
               | otherwise roll ur own distributed cdn and web servers
               | (linode, digital ocean). For db use the cloud (dbaas).
               | Once you have financial success (team of 3-5 on just ops)
               | go in house.
        
       | karmeliet wrote:
       | To be fair, to achieve the best multi-threaded performance in
       | Azure the Dv2/Dsv2 version provides real cores and not threads.
        
       | deltaci wrote:
       | A similar comparison on CI workloads between desktop CPUs and
       | Cloud(Azure) here: https://buildjet.com/for-github-
       | actions/blog/a-performance-r...
        
       | jeffbee wrote:
       | The Amazon c6i and other _6i types are very fast and put the lie
       | to the Graviton2 cost story, however, it's instructive that at
       | this present moment all _6i instance types are stocked out in us-
       | east-1. So, they're fast but you can't use 'em.
        
       | pid-1 wrote:
       | That's awesome.
       | 
       | As consumers, we really need more independent benchmarks.
       | 
       | Reading bullshit like "AWS FOOBAR MAKES RUNNING MACHINE LEARNING
       | IOT FINANCIAL MEDICAL APPLICATIONS 20% FASTER" doesn't help me to
       | architect systems.
       | 
       | I was looking for side project ideas, thanks for providing one.
        
       | christophilus wrote:
       | I'd be interested in how Vultr compares. In my experience, they
       | provide better bang for the buck vs the ones in this list. Also,
       | there's a decent website for such benchmarks:
       | https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/
        
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       (page generated 2022-03-07 23:01 UTC)