by WithinReason 6 hours ago
So a price per GB today is about the same as it was in 2010. 16 year regression, wow!
Drawing a line backward from today's high water mark only goes back to 2018.
2010 prices were significantly higher.
The chart is also not inflation adjusted, which would bring the equivalent date forward even further.
Nowhere near a 16 year regression.
Nominal. The inflation-adjusted price today is 2/3 of what it was then.
sure but you also need more gb these days for various tasks so it's not 1:1
I wonder if developers will start trying to do more with less in certain areas
Arguably they already did with the "cloud native" systems. There were plenty of examples personally known to me in the mid and late 2010s of smaller tech companies trying to run production PostgreSQL on 8-16 GB of RAM because they didn't want to pay the cloud RAM tax. Many "cloud native" systems were designed under these (mostly artificial IMO) RAM constraints.
Is that because the amount of available memory is limited for a single process? You can always add more storage and storage access is relatively the same regardless of whether it comes from the SSD inside the server or sits in another rack. Storage is a pretty linear cost when you're a cloud host buying storage in the hundreds of PB numbers. Whereas for memory, if you want the whole thing, you need the whole server even if your process is light on CPU requirements.
It's not 1:1 when you consider inflation either. Ram is still cheaper when inflation is a factor.