
The Economics of AWS - phsr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/12/the-economics-of-aws.html
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DanBlake
Using EC2 for anything but overflow is silly. The costs are extraordinarily
high if you are doing decent volume ( read- if you have more than 3-5 servers
)

Bandwidth is ridiculously expensive with them. You can get 3-4x cheaper per
megabit going dedicated.

Servers are crazy expensive. Compare the most powerful machine they have vs
something on 10tb / gigenet / theplanet for the price. You will definitely end
up with a more powerful machine for half the price on either.

The only real advantage to using ec2 is the hourly billing. Make its perfect
for overflow, but thats about it. I read about alot of startups that use ec2
for things like webservers or other servers that have 100% reliance.

Dont get me wrong. Some of Amazons offerings are great. The CDS and S3 can
take the bullshit out of dealing with the complexitys of each and might save
you a network engineer or 2. However, for EC2 there is no excuse. Its no more
difficult to setup a normal dedicated server than it is a EC2 box.

/endrant

~~~
gfodor
I agree it's more expensive, but I think you are undervaluing the instant
provisioning capability EC2 gives you and overestimating the impact of the
increased cost.

The way I look at it is if all these services were free, EC2 would win based
upon features. So, the question is, does cost matter?

For us, a single engineer's salary costs more than our entire yearly EC2 bill.
And, we're not even using cost saving measures like elasticity and reserved
instances.

And, EC2 actually drives costs down in ways hosting does not. First, as you
mentioned, it dramatically reduces the need for IT staff. (Though it doesn't
eliminate it, of course.)

Second, and IMHO, more importantly, the constraints EC2 imposes on you forces
you to build fault tolerant, shared-nothing systems. I'm sure many folks here
have worked at companies with hosted servers to find machines that are chock
full of random cron jobs, services, and so on. The instant provisioning
capability of EC2 combined with the constraints makes it very hard for you to
have these one off "god boxes" your system is hinging on. Beyond that, as
things get too messy, you have the freedom to automate and shut-down and bring
up fresh nodes instantly with no increase in cost. It's hard to me to estimate
the amount of man-hours we've saved and disasters we've avoided due to this
capability. It's allowed us to cleanly "refactor" our entire cluster over time
since we can reprovision nodes on demand as we improve the services or
architecture on those nodes.

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DanBlake
I dont buy that ec2 relieves the employee need. Its just as difficult, if not
MORE difficult to setup a ec2 instance than buying a dedicated server.

S3, SDB, CDS, etc.. Yes, those make things easier. EC2 Does not.

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teej
"Its just as difficult, if not MORE difficult to setup a ec2 instance than
buying a dedicated server."

Is this from experience? If so, please share it.

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DanBlake
Sure. I use EC2 to handle our overflow during peak hours. I had to literally
look up guides to dealing with it. Its not exactly straight forward how the IP
system works, and figuring out all the ec2 specific crap, images and storing
the image in S3, etc. etc.

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ghotli
I'm not sure I buy this argument. You had to look up guides for how to set up
something you are using because you find it valuable. How is this any
different from any other tool you've found valuable and set up? I'm sure that
too seemed arcane at first.

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senthil_rajasek
I agree that the ec2 is more expensive but... What are your alternatives?

~~~
DanBlake
Dedicated, Colo, Other VPS's if you must.

Shop around.

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senthil_rajasek
bringing up a new ec2 instance takes about .5 secs

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DanBlake
Well, you cant beat that logic. Spend away sheeple.

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jon_dahl
You're coming on a little strong, man. I appreciate your basic point, but
you're calling people sheep because they weigh the pros and cons of cloud
hosting differently than you.

