

Ask HN: Why cloud computing? - quizbiz

For hosting your apps, why go on the cloud? Is scalability the only reason. It seems so much more expensive.
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lrm242
A couple of reasons that are important to us:

1\. The ability to scale easily. This is going to depend on your application's
traffic pattern. Is it predictable? If not, how costly is a failure due to an
unforeseen spike? For us, since we host other people's communities, it's very
important that we be able to scale easily. I'm willing to pay a premium for
this.

2\. Amazon builds into their pricing the cost of handling the day to day
routine failures and the bigger 'oh shit' failures. Again, I'd rather pay for
this directly rather than having it as a liability by either (a) paying
someone on my staff to worry about it, or (b) ignoring it all together turning
it into a hidden liability.

3\. The Amazon architecture allows us to do things that we can't do elsewhere
easily. For example: easily moving IPs between instances with Elastic IPs.
This makes doing certain types of upgrades much easier. We boot a new instance
with new software, make sure it's working, then swap the IP over. Also, the
combination of EBS and S3 are a lifesaver for doing backups. Again, we're
managing other people's data so I'm happy to pay a premium to do hourly
snapshots of my data and continuous backup rotation through S3, with
occasional movement offsite using AWS Import/Export.

These are just some examples. Amazon makes many things easier, and only a few
things harder, and on the surface appears to cost 'more'. However, I believe
when you factor in the true cost of running a site, including all of the time
involved in handling failures, designing architectures that have been designed
before, performing monkey maintenance (swapping drives, power supplies,
whatever), you'll find that the Amazon stack is probably on par or cheaper
from a total cost of ownership point of view.

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richardw
Personally, because it reduces the skills base I need on board. I can ignore
most issues below the app level and focus on what I do best.

I've used Google App Engine and Azure but am focusing on GAE because of costs
and the ability to ignore instances. When I'm not there and the server falls
down, the App Engine team will be seriously motivated to get it up. Over time,
I expect them to hugely improve reliability without me having to upgrade
anything. My VM at Slicehost has been fantastic but is probably less secure
than a Google VM.

The crazy thing is that I won't have to pay Google a cent until I get serious
traffic.

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sachinag
There's actually an element that's way overlooked: peace of mind. Let's say
AWS goes down. 1) You can't do anything about it, so while you're upset,
you're not losing sleep driving to your colo and back at 3am. 2) Many, many
other companies - some of whom are infinitely larger than you - are also down.
No one is going to mock you in TechCrunch for being down. They're going to
mock Amazon, Rackspace, or whomever.

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vinutheraj
That seems such a dubious reason to do so, just because ignorance is bliss !

~~~
netsp
Depends on how you look at it. If you accept that your own abilities are also
limited and that you might make costly mistakes, you might conclude that the
total downtime will probably be the same. Say X hours per year. The difference
is that if you use Amazon, you don't have to spend X hours (even if those
hours are in the middle of the night) running around fixing it, someone else
does this.

Then, when you need to explain why, you have an easier time too. There is the
'no one got fired for buying IBM' spect to it, but there is also genuine peace
of mind.

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dangrossman
Moving from physical servers to EC2 (with reserved instances, that cut the
hourly prices significantly) saved me $300 a month.

And I feel much less stress now that I'm "in the cloud". If a server breaks,
one click starts a new instance with the apps and configuration already in
place. If a virtual hard drive crashes, one click restores a snapshot.

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rmoriz
Let's look outside the USA:

Here in Germany, hosting is rediclious cheap. You get decent quad core boxes
with 12GB RAM for about 70EUR (~100$) including 2-3TB of traffic.

Compared to ec2 it's reeeealy cheap and located in the middle of continental
europe. The Dublin/Ireland location of EC2 has a much higher latency and is
more expensive than the US instances.

So most startups [1] rent a lot of those cheap boxes in Germany, doing a
loadbalancing/failover setup in front of it. done. If you need more hardware:
It usually takes <24hrs to get a new box. So just order 1-2 more than you
currently need as backup for scaling and faults.

[1] I analyzed that from the most popular hosting provider of
<http://IsItRails.com>

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ethanhunt
Hey rmoriz,

could you tell me the name of that provider? Seems like a delicious option.

Thanks

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st3fan
Depends on what you mean with 'The Cloud' and 'apps'.

Hosting something 24/7 on for example Amazon's EC2 is barely cost effective.
On the other hand doing regular hosting combined with EC2 for peaks is
extremely cost effective.

~~~
moe
_Hosting something 24/7 on for example Amazon's EC2 is barely cost effective_

That myth keeps popping up but is simply not true in many situations. There is
a wide corridor of use-cases in the mid-range where EC2 is indeed more cost
effective than rented or owned servers. Sometimes dramatically so.

The number of factors involved is obviously quite large, but lets just
consider the baseline cost of having a "large" instance running for 3 years
straight: $10386 (or as low as $4510 if you commit by reservation).

You'll be hard-pressed to match that figure for a rented or bought server,
simply because EC2 is a 50.000 server gig and likely yields _slightly_ more
economy-of-scale savings than your setup ever could.

~~~
wwkeyboard
But to make a large instance comparable to a real server you would need to
include some data transfer and persistent storage in with the price of the
server. The EBS page estimates a 100 gig store for a DB would be about $26 a
month. If you add to that a gigabyte of data out an hour(at $0.17) you would
be up to almost 10 grand for three years of a reserved instance. $10,000 / 36
months is $277 a month, for a server.

~~~
moe
If you add bandwidth and storage to one side of the equation you'll also have
to add it on the other side.

Do you get the bandwidth cheaper elsewhere? Perhaps but probably not
significantly.

Do you get storage with similar flexibility and scalability cheaper elsewhere?
Highly unlikely.

Oh and housing, power and staff aren't free either. Neither are the premium
support contracts with your various suppliers to get same-day replacements for
failed hardware.

Once you factor everything in you'll realize that EC2 is not nearly as
expensive as it may seem at a glance.

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nagoff
Recovery is also pretty useful - I posted about our recovery from a worst-
case-total-server-death here:

<http://unfeatureddocuments.com/content/disaster-and-recovery>

For a small startup without a dedicated sysadmin I can't think of anything
better than EC2 for handling this kind of thing.

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Kaizyn
The main drivers are cheaper startup costs and less of a need to manage
hardware yourself (usually including backups).

~~~
rajasaur
And that you dont have to worry in case your site get a spike due to it being
slashdotted.

The other advantage I can think of is to see if a better configuration would
help scalability needs. For e.g. if I think a x-bit x-core box would work
better for my app, there isnt a need to buy the whole thing before knowing it
does no good. I could just pick one from the cloud and pay only for usage.

