I'm struggling to find a way to express my opinion about this video without seeming like a complete ass.

If the author's point was to make a low effort "ha ha AWS sucks" video, well sure: success, I guess.

Nobody outside of AWS sales is going to say AWS is cheaper.

But comparing the lowest end instances, and apparently, using ECS without seeming to understand how they're configuring or using it just makes their points about it being slower kind of useless. Yes you got some instances that were 5-10x slower than Hetzner. On it's own that's not particularly useful.

I thought, going in, that this was going to be along the lines of others I have seen, previously: you can generally get a reasonably beefy machine with a bunch of memory and local SSDs that will come in half or less the cost of a similar spec EC2 instance. That would've been a reasonable path to go. Add on that you don't have issues with noisy neighbors when running a dedicated box, and yeah - something people can learn from.

But this... Yeah. Nah. Sorry

Maybe try again but get some help speccing out the comparison configuration from folks who do have experience in this.

Unfortunately it will cost more to do a proper comparison with mid-range hardware.

I’ve come to believe that such comparisons usually come from people who don’t understand the trade-offs of AWS in production.

Each project has certainly its own requirements. If you have the manpower and a backup plan with blue/green for every infrastructure component, then absolutely harness that cost margin of yours. If it’s at a break even when you factor in specialist continuity - training folks so nothing’s down if your hardware breaks, then AWS wins.

If your project can tolerate downtime and your SREs may sleep at night, then you might profit less from the several niners HA SLOs that AWS guarantees.

It’s very hard and costly to replicate what AWS gives you if you have requirements close to enterprise levels. Also, the usual argument goes - when you’re a startup you’ll be happy to trade CAPEX for OPEX.

For an average hobby project maybe not the best option.

As for latency, you can get just as good. Major exchanges run their matching engines in AWS DCs, you can co-locate.

I'm migrating my last AWS services to dedicated servers with Gitops. In principle, AWS give you a few benefits that are worth paying for. In practice, I have seen all of them to be massive issues. Price and performance are obviously bad. More annoying than that, their systems have arbitrary limitations that you may not be aware of because they're considered 'corner cases' -- e.g. my small use-case bumped against DNS limitation and the streaming of replies was not supported. Then, you have a fairly steep learning curve with their products and their configuration DSLs.

There are Gitops solution that give you all the benefits that are promised by it, without any of the downsides or compromises. You just have to bite the bullet and learn kubernetes. It may be a bit more of a learning curve, but in my experience I would say not by much. And you have much more flexibility in the precise tech stack that you choose, so you can reduce it by using stuff you're already know well.

S3 is also 10x more expensive than this single consumer grade second hand hard drive I have.

Managed NAT gateways are also 10000x more expensive than my router.

This is a boring argument that has been done to death.

10x sounds way off. Try something with good nvme disks and decent amount of ram. It should be 30x

I do like watching these comparisons however it reminds me of a conversation I had recently with my 10 year old.

Son: Why does the croissant cost €2.80 here while it's only €0.45 in Lidl? Who would buy that?

Me: You're not paying for the croissant, you're paying for the staff to give it to you, for the warm café, for the tables to be cleaned and for the seat to sit on.

I measured this years ago: https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...

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.

This is always an unfair comparison because for any realistic comparison you need to have two servers on two locations for georedundancy and need to pay for the premises and their physical security, too. For example, you need to pay for security locks with access log and a commercial security company, or you have to pay for co-location in a datacenter.

When you add up all these costs plus the electricity bill, I wager that many cloud providers are on the cheaper side due to the economy of scale. I'd be interested in such a more detailed comparison for various locations / setups vs cloud providers.

What almost never goes into this discussion, however, is the expertise and infrastructure you lose when you put your servers into the cloud. Your own servers and their infrastructure are MOAT that can be sold as various products if needed. In contrast, relying on a cloud provider is mostly an additional dependency.

Didn't even mention the difference in data costs, or S3 plus transfer, because then we'll be going into 2-orders-of-magnitude differences ...

Not to mention what happens when you pay per megabyte and someone ddos-es you. Cloud brought back almost all hosting antipatterns, and means denial-of-service attacks really should be renamed denial-of-wallet attacks. And leaving a single S3 bucket, a single Serverless function, a single ... available (not even open) makes you vulnerable if someone knows of figures out the URL.

I mean yeah they say that 1 vCPU == 1 hyper thread which is 10% of a CPU.

I hate these comparisons because it's not apples to apples.

The entire point of AWS is so you don't have to get a dedicated server.

It's infra as a service.

now look at spot instance comparisons

Why is this a video? I'm not going to watch it. I will read the AI summary of the transcript though:

The video argues that AWS is dramatically overpriced and underpowered compared to cheap VPS or dedicated servers. Using Sysbench benchmarks, the creator shows that a low-cost VPS outperforms AWS EC2 and ECS by large margins (EC2 has ~20% of the VPS’s CPU performance while costing 3× more; ECS costs 6× more with only modest improvements). ECS setup is also complicated and inconsistent. Dedicated servers offer about 10× the performance of similarly priced AWS options. The conclusion: most apps don’t need cloud-scale architecture, and cloud dominance comes from marketing—not superior value or performance.