Discount rates are actually much better too on the bigger instances. Therefore the "sticker price" that people compare on the public site is no where close to a fair comparison.
We technically aren't supposed to talk about pricing publically, but I'm just going to say that we run a few 8XL and 12Xl RDS instances and we pay ~40% off the sticker price.
If you switch to Aurora engine the pricing is absurdly complex (its basically impossible to determine without a simulation calculator) but AWS is even more aggressive with discounting on Aurora, not to mention there are some legit amazing feature benefits by switching.
I'm still in agreeance that you could do it cheaper yourself at a Data Center. But there are some serious tradeoffs made by doing it that way. One is complexity and it certainly requires several new hiring decisions. Those have their own tangible costs, but there are a huge amount of intangible costs as well like pure inconvenience, more people management, more hiring, split expertise, complexity to network systems, reduce elasticity of decisions, longer commitments, etc.. It's harder to put a price on that.
When you account for the discounts at this scale, I think the cost gap between the two solutions is much smaller and these inconveniences and complexities by rolling it yourself are sometimes worth bridging that smaller gap in cost in order to gain those efficiencies.
> but I'm just going to say that we run a few 8XL and 12Xl RDS instances and we pay ~40% off the sticker price.
Genuinely curious, how do you that?
We pay a couple of million dollars per year and the biggest spend is RDS. The bulk of those are 8xl and 12xl as you mention and we have a lot of these. We do have savings plans, but those are nowhere near 40%.
Yeah 40% seems like a pipedream. I was at a Fortune 500 defense firm and we couldn't get any cloud provider to even offer us anything close to that discount if we agreed to move to them for 3-4 years minimum. That org ended up not migrating because it was significantly cheaper to buy land and build datacenters from scratch than to rent in the cloud.
Defense firms do a lot more than just government work. Also, there are definitely discounts in govcloud when Fortune 500 companies that operate 30+ datacenters start talking to govcloud providers about potentially migrating to their services.
