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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

> No, since it is stupidly expensive in itself.

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.

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Hey koolba, I apologise in advance for nitpicking, but I'd like to make some counterpoints:

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)

You're charging people to manage their environments (providing expertise) and complaining about needing to develop additional skills to do so efficiently.

If you have the data with price/performance comparisons, I'd think this is something the rest of us would be interested in.

You're charging people to manage their environments (providing expertise) and complaining about needing to develop additional skills to do so efficiently.

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.

Your making value decisions based on expertise in your existing delivery methods and trying to map them 1-1 to aws features, that may or may not map 1-1. You keep disparaging aws' pricing (stupidly expensive, serious premium), without providing an alternative/baseline.

Again, if you have numbers and not broad statements we'd appreciate them.

Your making value decisions based on expertise in your existing delivery methods and trying to map them 1-1 to aws features, that may or may not map 1-1

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?

You started with general pricing arguments with hostile language without providing numbers to support - making generalizations without that data is useless, right? How is a reader supposed to take those statements? It leads to using your experience statement (I offer high performance, managed, HA hosting to selected clients) to make judgements on the comment.

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.

I apologise if this comes across as an ad-hominem, but you sound like my ex-wife: you keep talking about how I say things, and keep ignorning the actual content of my comments. So, I'll do the same with you as I did with her - goodbye! :)

Here are some numbers:

AWS Internet traffic costs ~60x as much as renting bare metal servers.

No change in architecture can change that fact.

That's one example and matches a use case where AWS / "Cloud" providers may not be ideal. Hybrid setups with external CDN can mitigate some of this as well.

Except the EFS is really slow with small amounts of data and you collect/burn credits based on throughput so small amounts of data and load means you will probably be better of with a tape drive.

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

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