

Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/03/amazon-ec2-dedicated-instances.html

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patio11
There are some features which read, essentially, "Check this box if you're an
enterprise." This is one of them -- it addresses a very narrow slice of
security concerns of the sort that people with a checklist need to address and
most of us are (by implication) OK with ignoring. You should generally expect
checking boxes like this to be very expensive, because anyone who checks it is
not primarily motivated by money. (Similarly, Amazon isn't implementing this
so they can get $10 per hour. That is absence of whee. Whee is landing the
kind of client who requires this sort of thing to consider EC2 as an option.
Their needs laugh in the general direction of $70k a year.)

See also: compliance, auditing, etc, etc.

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jbooth
Some people actually need the performance guarantees, too. I've heard a lot of
people whine about the unpredictable performance of I/O caused by shared
tenancy, specifically people running decent sized cassandra/hbase
installations or multiple database hosts. If you're willing to pay for a
higher guaranteed minimum baseline, you could be in this market without a
butthead ISO 9000 checklist.

~~~
hboon
But Amazon can, and still will put multiple (of your) instances onto the same
box. So performance is still not as predictable as a dedicated machine.

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qixxiq
I understand a fractional machine being wasted, but I'm a little confused as
to the pricing. $10/hour => $10 x 24 x 30 = $7200/month?

I understand its useful if your running thousands of instances but I don't see
the value in it as a public service. Wouldn't it be much cheaper for small
clients to simply take your business elsewhere where you can get high-end
servers in the $2000 range?

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d_r
This looks like a fixed cost _per region_ , rather than a cost per instance.
If so, it might actually end up being quite cost-efficient.

 _"we add a $10/hour charge whenever you have at least one Dedicated Instance
running in a Region. When figured as a per-instance cost, this charge will
asymptotically approach $0 (per instance) for customers that run hundreds or
thousands of instances"_

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staunch
Really exciting. By far my biggest hope for EC2 is scriptable on demand
dedicated hardware. I even flirted with the idea of launching a company the
did just this.

The pricing seems designed to make it a feature only usable by really big
customers though, which seems like a big mistake that hopefully they can do
something about. Maybe by adjusting their server configs or something.

Still keep getting impressed by the AWS team.

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thwarted
I believe Softlayer offers an API where you can script some aspects of
ordering and managing machines. I haven't spent much time on it though, but I
suspect it isn't scriptable in the sense that EC2 stuff is.

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hboon
You can order and provision (with hardware config, OS installation/image) via
their API.

I just find that the time to provision is much slower than EC2 (10-20 minutes
vs. 1-5 minutes).

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snissn
The pricing model seems like it could be a big win for heroku, phpfog, and
anyone else arbitraging EC2. Edit: My reasoning is that currently EC2
performance sucks and is reliably inconsistent, and if you can spend a fixed
price to ensure that you're actually getting what you're paying for, as an ec2
arbitrator, your clients are going to be a lot more satisfied

Edit 2: Ah i see, i misunderstood

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tlrobinson
I think you're misunderstanding the pricing model. AWS is charging $10 per
hour on top of the regular per instance charges, because if you have a small
number of instances they may have to dedicate entire machines to your small
instances. As you increase the number of dedicated instances they can put more
of your instances on your dedicated machines, recovering the wasted resources.

Heroku and other multitenant PaaS services have no reason to use dedicated
instances... customers concerned about running on multitenant platforms
wouldn't even consider them in the first place.

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streeter
My main concern with AWS is still EBS and the network latency. While this
would prevent others on the same box from starving you of resources, EBS could
still be affected by a neighboring box hammering the network.

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alex1
The biggest advantage to this (other than security) is that you won't need to
share I/O or CPU time with other people, resulting in much more consistent and
predictable performance across the board.

Now, if only they could provide EBS this way...

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gregwebs
But you have to share it with yourself once you launch multiple instances,
which you will if you are paying $10/hour.

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ericz
I don't see how this makes sense for Amazon.

The $10/hr charge seems to be a flat rate no matter how many dedicated
instances you have in the region. Thus I can start 10000 "small" instances and
pay pennies per hour + $10/10000. Surely a small instance does not cover the
cost of an entire physical machine.

This seems like an economical way to DoS EC2

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bigiain
I'm pretty sure the $10/hr ensures no-one _else's_ VMs run on the hardware
your VM is running on. If you spin up 10 small instances, I think they'd
happily put them all on the same hardware, just like that might have done
anyway, and pocket the $10/hr for no cost to Amazon (except the minor
administrative cost associated with getting that all right).

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bdonlan
Sounds like this might reduce redundancy - if all your instances tend to be on
the same machine, a single failure could take them all out...

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jeffbarr
It doesn't work like that. There's some intelligence built in to the instance
placement algorithm to guard against this.

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mikiem
It sounds to me like they are saying they really don't want to sell these
Dedicated Instances.

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Catalin
10$ / hour is HUGE

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n_are_q
That's $86,700 per year, not cheap to say the least. Is that kind of setup
good enough for some level of PCI compliance? I think they still require that
your servers are physically secure.

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justincormack
Yes Amazon has PCI compliance now, well the parts they need. The physical
security is fine too, their datacentres are well secured. So this type of
workload is possible.

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rmoriz
What about IPv6?

