Have you tried EFS? https://aws.amazon.com/efs/
EFS is ridiculous cheap if you use it the way it's intended. It's billed per-byte so you only store things that you actually need shared on there.
If you're looking for an OCFS2 replacement for storing large volumes of data or to run something like Oracle RAC atop then you're probably better off either doing it yourself.
> Moreover, AWS services in general are ridiculously expensive for what has always turned out to be a sub-par experience. Overly complicated to set up and manage, lacklustre performance, and premium pricing. Thanks, but no thanks.
Besides the pricing argument, I'd disagree with all of those points. It's a joy to set up once you know what you're doing and performance is more than adequate for all the services I've used (with plenty of knobs to fiddle). Outside of external bandwidth pricing I don't even consider it that far out of line pricing wise.
It's a joy to set up once you know what you're doing
Which is (in my own long and active AWS experience) another way of saying "You need to make a significant investment in time, effort, and tooling to get to a point where it is fast and simple to bring up a reasonably complex environment. You are re-learning domain knowledge you likely already have, just so that you can use Amazon's product. This in-itself isn't a bad thing, depending on what you get back for it, but the return value is "I now know what I am doing with AWS".
performance is more than adequate
I can get more than adequate pretty much everywhere. I am paying a serious premium, so I really want to be in the amazingly fast bracket, not the adequate.
Outside of external bandwidth pricing I don't even consider it that far out of line pricing wise.
Yeah, they are, both directly as well as in terms of value for money. There are many ways to get increased performance at lower costs with reduced complexity (complexity also cotst real money). I change hosting provider roughly every 12 months to take advantage of investments in new generation hardware and good deals, and everytime I do so, I check out new features, updated pricing, and do the sums to work out value for money (I offer high performance, managed, HA hosting to selected clients)
If you have the data with price/performance comparisons, I'd think this is something the rest of us would be interested in.
That is a straw man argument. AWS isn't the only way to efficiently manage infrastructure, and it can be argued it isn't even efficient, full stop.
Again, if you have numbers and not broad statements we'd appreciate them.
eh, no. You have no idea about my areas of expertise, what features I require, or how I map them, or what I map them to, so you cannot make this kind of statement (well, you can, and you did, but it is a fallacy).
you have numbers and not broad statements we'd appreciate them.
I'm sure you do. Doing what I do today in terms of functional parity, but doing it on AWS, will work out roughly 2.5 times more expensive, and will not gain me any additional features or functionality, and will leave me with about two-thirds of reduction in overall performance against metrics that are of interest to me. Also "we"? You speak for others? Who are the "we" that have appointed you as their speaker?
The we should be anybody bothering to read this comment chain - who wouldn't be interested in seeing AWS' lack of value in your use case / competitors that succeed? Having done migrations to and from AWS for past employers, this would definitely interest me in the least.
AWS Internet traffic costs ~60x as much as renting bare metal servers.
No change in architecture can change that fact.
For a 10 GiB EFS drive you get a base throughput of 0.5 MiB/s and can burst up to 100 MiB/s for 7 minutes per day
Do you want to focus some significant percentage of your time on managing infrastructure or do you want to focus on making what you sell to customers better?
I know it sounds like marketing and I know there's a point at which the cost of cloud doesn't make sense, but I do believe that that inflection point is pretty low if you're in a field that is moving quickly or are say a new startup and need to get to market with a minimum-viable-product to get an idea off the ground -- what a shame it would be to fumble that opportunity re-inventing the wheel with infrastructure.
Yes
Can you turn off unused instances?
Yes
Can you automatically and seamlessly move to the latest hardware running on-prem?
Yes
Do you want to focus some significant percentage of your time on managing infrastructure...
We spend about 10 minutes per day looking after the stack, with about 4 to 6 hours every 6 weeks looking at if and where we can improve things. We then spend about a week or so in depth once every year roughly evaluating different providers, and we typically end up moving to a different provider, which takes a few days.
...or do you want to focus on making what you sell to customers better?
This (infrastructure) is a big part of what we sell to our customers. What we do (and have been doing for about 15 years) is what you kids appear to be calling "devops" now. I was an early adopter (and discarder) of CFEngine...
Secondly, none of my points were specifically about AWS but they were about cloud in general.