
High Performance Computing at Amazon: A Cost Study - jasonwatkinspdx
http://twopieceset.blogspot.com/2009/03/high-performance-computing-at-amazon.html
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jasonwatkinspdx
I've done similar cost calculations at various times. Assuming your
application(s) can run on cost effective commodity hardware, co-location
becomes cheaper once you can occupy roughly half a rack. This assumes a middle
of the market data center, 1 full time sysadmin at 100k or equivalent smart
hands hours and a 2:1 peak to average traffic level and dynamically scaling
your ec2 instances accordingly.

If your traffic is peaky, but those peaks can be anticipated with at least a
fraction of an hour's time, then ec2 can be a win at a larger host count.

And of course, it almost aways makes since for batch jobs like scraping.

Another interesting way to use ec2 is as a disaster recovery plan: keep your
application configuration current in ami's and keep a db slave going there. If
your primary co-location fails catastrophically you can be up at scale on ec2
as fast as your DNS propagates.

Overall hybrid models seem to be the most effective way to use ec2.

