It seemed kind of genius to me. The numbers look solid and easy to replicate. Talking about backup yachts is a lot more catchy than saying DBMS overprovisioning helps build fat margins for infrastructure providers.
(OK, the second formulation has a poetic ring to it for the accountants among us.)
Is it wrong? Jeff Bezos is suing SpaceX because he’s jealous. Your AWS dollars could literally contribute towards the demise of the American space renaissance.
It got you to click, and to create engagement for this article, I wasn't aware of this product's existence and I likely wouldn't have been if not for the clickbait headline that got it to surface. That's a successful marketing endeavor right there.
I would be surprised if that was the case. Picking on Bezos specifically does a better job at creating drama, than by pointing a finger at a giant faceless organization.
The reason reason people overpay for large databases on RDS: RDS spend makes little difference to a lot of companies when the alternative is hosting it in-house. AWS provides multi-az failover and ability to add read-replicas with a click of a button. The support is also pretty good if you pay for the premium tier: I've had a RDS support member join major database migrations (might not happen for smaller companies, but we are talking about large spenders here).
I don't think he was saying RDS is overpriced...he was saying he's seen people use it inefficiently (e.g., still running the default DB config), which can raise RDS costs unnecessarily.
Anyone know why this post got flagged? I’m guessing it’s one of either the clickbaity ad-hominem nature that has inspired some less than desirable comments or the fact it’s an ad for a paid product. Regardless of either, I found the actual technical content extremely interesting and discussion-worthy.
Should also add a disclaimer that I work for a direct competitor to RDS and OtterTune would likely find similar issues with our product :)
Apparently we are overpaying Bezos for our bandwidth and storage costs, as well!
Just went hunting for a better price on bandwidth the other day and was blown away by what hetzner cloud has to offer. (20TB free bandwidth per month, with an extra TB charged at 1.19 EUR ($1.38 USD) or $0.00138/GB.
AWS charges $0.05/GB ... How/why is AWS >32x more expensive?
That Hetzner offer is like 5 years old now. If you buy one of their recent offerings, bandwidth is unmetered now. You can easily send around 150TB/month at no extra cost with their offers.
OVH can get you unmetered servers with 1-3gbit/s for 100-400 USD/month as well. That's around 500TB/month after accounting for how much you actually get.
The aws and other cloud vendors markup on bandwidth is probably at least 50x. It is their moat. If they lower it their big spenders like snowflake will leave for their own datacenters
Once you are in the roach motel the path of least resistance is to buy other services from AWS rather than the competitors because of the egress charges. It is completely anticompetitive and I expect even the toothless US antitrust authorities will crack down on that.
I am very happy with AWS Aurora PostgreSQL. I feel safe that my company's data is kept there, and the surrounding UX and tooling is to my satisfaction.
I also don't see the point of mentioning Jeff Bezos's other investments. They are not connected to the price and performance characteristics of AWS databases.
Something interesting that wasn't mentioned in this article, but was mentioned in the other Ottertune blog article [0] is that significant performance improvements can be achieved with the help of open-source tools like MySQLTuner [1].
This looks useful, but I'm hesitant to give a third party access to my production databases. What assurances do I have in regard to the safety of this tool and whether or not it will access my client's secure data?
OtterTune does not need to access user tables or view queries (nor do we want to). OtterTune only collects runtime metrics from the database (e.g., InnoDB stats, pg_stat_database) and CloudWatch. These performance counters are enough of a signal to tell how your application uses the database and how optimize the system accordingly.
Two of our major deployments that we can talk about were at a French bank and Booking.com, both of which are in Europe. Their infosec people looked at what we were sending to our service and said that were no GDPR issues.
The original motivation of the OtterTune project started because when I was a grad student I had trouble getting real workloads and data sets for my experiments. So I decided to purposely work on a database optimization tool that did not need access to the things that you are worried about when I started a new professor.
I'm not sure why people keep bringing up Jeff Bezos when he's not longer CEO at Amazon. Sure he has a vested stake in the company but it's still an annoying statement.
Equinix metal pricing is considerably cheaper but you won’t find managed services there so gotta do everything yourself. The cloud vendors aren’t sticking it to you - they’re taking advantage of orgs unwillingness and incompetence to run their own infra and I can’t blame them
Using your own analogy car repair costs arm and leg with the dealer vs diy (if you know how and have access to tools). So not that different from cloud providers really
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