> instead of spending 10x on (taxpaying) staff and employees within the UK, in order to create a new technology that may be useful and solve other problems, they are spending 1x on Amazon.
You imply that Amazon/AWS doesn't employ any staff in the UK, which is wrong.
> Amazon will not pay any tax within the UK
Amazon must certainly pay taxes in the UK, or at least the tax ends up being paid on Amazon share price increases from employees share vesting.
> For my own startup, I built a small cluster of 17 servers for just beneath $55K, and that had a month-to-month expense of $600 placed in a co-lo. In comparison, the same setup at AWS would be $96K per month.
Why would you build exactly the same setup in AWS as for on-prem, unless your objective is to (dishonestly) show that on-prem is cheaper?
Lift-and-shift-to-the-cloud is known to be more expensive, because you aren't taking advantage of the features available to you which would allow you to reduce your costs.
Your results (e.g. that z1d.xlarge with 4 vCPUs is only 10% slower than z1d.2xlarge with 8 vCPUs) shows that the "performance" you were testing was disk IO throughput (probably dominated by disk latency), not vCPUs.
> My takeaways were that many cloud provider offerings make no sense whatsoever, and that Xeon processors are mostly great if you are a cloud provider and want to offer overbooked "vCPUs".
> I haven't tested those specific setups, but I strongly suspect a dedicated server from OVH is much faster than a 4.16xlarge from AWS.
You seem to be implying that AWS/EC2 does CPU over-provisioning on all instance types; this is incorrect, only T-family instance types use CPU over-provisioning.
> Is this because ISP's can see DNS traffic? as it's in the clear over UDP...
Not necessarily.
It could very easily be done via IP address matching (think BGP communities that advertise specific subnets between one part of a network and another, as are typically used for optimal CDN routing etc.).
In my country, our anti-ISP media claims that we have the most expensive internet in the world, but 10/5Mbps FTTH (in most cases with free upgrades to 20/2Mbps for the duration of COVID-19 WFH guidance mandated by the government) is quite commonly available at < $20-$25/month, and where it isn't, 10/1Mbps ADSL is available for $25-$30/month (including POTS voice service).
Thus, it is impossible that you, in the country of ~$20 1Gbps service, have worse and more expensive service.
In my opinion, there is really only one valid complaint in the article:
> We need more choices for our ISPs
If you fix this, e.g. by requiring all last-mile owners to offer the last-mile access at or below their (audited, sufficiently-profitable) input cost to their retail products, most of the remaining problems would sort themselves out, without having micro-managing of ISP features.
Unless you are going to start regulating OTTs in what features/value they can provide, I think it's unfair on (non-monopoly) ISPs to prevent them from providing innovative features because of "net neutrality should trump all" opinions.
Actually, maybe it's more the fact that at a prominent tech company:
* zsh is the default shell on a large proportion of servers that have read-only /home, so you can't easily change to your preferred shell
* a training guide that many new developers follows states incorrectly that:
> If you are using Bash and you have the option of using ZSH, you should switch to it. ZSH has additional auto-complete and history features that Bash doesn’t have (but don't worry - those features will not be relevant to this tutorial.)
oh-my-zsh seems to be recommended by a lot of developers in this company, even though:
* the default mechanism to install is curl|sh (there is no Homebrew package) on developer machines which have privileged access to a lot of resources
* installing it via its recommended installation procedure on dev machines would violate company policies, whereas installing bash-completion wouldn't
> For simple graph diagrams it's easy enough to open up a separate graphviz .dot file, write up a graph specification, run it through dot or neato, and include the .png in your markdown file. And then automate this with a Makefile.
Or just use zim ( https://zim-wiki.org/ ) which allows you to embed graphviz diagrams in any 'page', and many other features.
> Some examples of this would be Oracle Identity Manager (which is absolutely awful but is still actually the only IdM solution really capable of scaling with massive enterprise companies)
The "massive enterprise company" I work for doesn't use Oracle IdM ...
It was used at the previous company I worked for, but it had endless problems and I think it was only bought as part of a very badly-run "buy an expensive 'enterprise content management platform and then not use it properly' initiative".
It's main feature seemed to be to import identities from LDAP servers into an Oracle database fronted by a very poorly performing non-compliant LDAP server (or, you could say, selling Oracle Database licenses).
> it apparently began the internal renewal process at the exact instant the cert expired (rather than 30 days in advance as is common with ACME-based renewal).
> Q: When does ACM renew certificates?
>
> ACM begins the renewal process up to 60 days prior to the certificate’s expiration date. The validity period for ACM certificates is currently 13 months. Refer to the ACM User Guide for more information about managed renewal.
> We switched TLS termination from the load balancer to Envoy + cert-manager and the results were much better. You also get HTTP/2 out of the deal. We also wrote a thing that fetches every https host and makes sure the certificate works, and fed the expiration times in prometheus to actually be alerted when rotation is broken. Both are features Amazon should support out of the box for the $20/month + $$/gigabyte you pay them for a TLS-terminating load balancer.
I don't see any current load-balancer priced at $20/month (ALB, NLB and Classic ELB are all ~ $8/month), so I can't guess which one you were using here ...
> A t3.large only has a "baseline performance" of 30%
> Instead, I'd compare e2-std-2 to m5.large like you started to do so.
Yes, a "baseline performance" of 100% would more or less be an M-family instance, but with additional overhead to manage noisy neighbors etc. (and thus T-family is slightly more expensive for the same constant performance than M-family). T-family is specifically for non-constant workloads where CPU over-commit provides value, but without memory over-commit, which can result in highly-variable performance.
Neither T-family or M-family do "memory stealing" aka memory overcommit, like GCP's E2 seemingly does (but the pricing page doesn't explicitly state this, and your detailed comparisons omit this crucial difference).
So, apples and oranges; you shouldn't really "compare" without benchmarking ...
What is the "baseline" memory GCP E2 instances get?
Then the status page would be almost entirely useless ...