

53% of 'light' AWS users are paying too much - BernardGui
http://webdev360.com/53-of-light-aws-users-are-paying-too-much-42187.html

======
Udo
This article discredits itself:

    
    
      Newvem does not provide any information on how it defines the ‘light user’
      category, but [...] The company is also somewhat vague about the area under 
      consideration -- do the figures refer to computing power (EC2), storage 
      (S3), or the whole AWS package combined?
    

There is really nothing of substance to see here. On the other hand, the main
point being made is probably not wrong. It makes sense for most server owners
who only experience light traffic to have 99%+ of their EC2 capacity unused.

For example, I rent a Micro instance for all my stuff and server load is
mostly 0.00 with less than 3% of CPU utilization - that's a couple of dynamic
websites with about 8-10 HTTP requests per second overall. I'm willing to bet
there are a lot of customers out there having an even lower traffic rate and
Micro _is_ the smallest server you can rent so of course there will be a lot
of unused capacity.

~~~
danoprey
Don't know if it's the same definition, but their GigaOM post defines light
as: “light” AWS users — those with fewer than 8 instances
[http://gigaom.com/cloud/newvem-pulls-back-the-curtain-on-
ama...](http://gigaom.com/cloud/newvem-pulls-back-the-curtain-on-amazon-cloud-
usage/)

Obviously it wouldn't make sense for people who only use micro instances, but
then again people who only use one micro instance don't use a third party cost
management tool.

~~~
ilann
Yes this is correct. Those numbers are based on data published at
<http://www.newvem.com/topic/cloud-radar>. For reference, light user are those
with up to 8 instances, medium users have between 9 and 35 instances, and
heavy users above 35. We didn't publish the total number of users in each
segment, but I can confirm that that the survey was based on a sample of
around 200 customers, as mentioned in GigaOm's article

The reason we chose to segment by number of instances is that we consider this
as a good metric for the complexity of one's cloud footprint, and the
corresponding effort required to manage this footprint.

------
gabrtv
Most of the excess charges I saw during my AWS consulting were due to dev/test
environments with fat 64-bit instances that were left running overnight and
during the weekends.

Why? It's relatively easy to stand up environments in the cloud, but shutting
them off and redeploying takes forever. There is no efficient way to turn
complex stacks off and on without a massive time investment from the cloud ops
team.

OpDemand solves this with a management toolbar that includes stop/restart
functionality. Under the hood we use a combination of EBS volumes and
configuration management to allow users to put their cloud environments on ice
when not in use. Restarting everything on Monday is a 1-click affair.

------
mark_l_watson
OK, this is probably correct, but so what? Keeping a prepaid micro and/or
small instance running all of the time is more a matter of convenience than
cost effectiveness.

------
taylorbuley
Looks like a study driven by a marketing department.

I think there's an assumption here that idle or stopped servers are bad in
themselves. There's definitely a cost associated with spinning up and
configuring a new instance, so I don't think this assumption always holds
true.

