
The New AWS TCO Calculator - jeffbarr
http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/the-new-aws-tco-calculator/
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dice
Their comparison sizes for instances versus physical machines is laughable.
For a 12 core physical machine with 64GB of RAM they list the r3.2xlarge
instance size as unit-for-unit comparable (10 instances versus 10 machines I
had configured).

Yeah... no. 8 vCPUs are nowhere near as fast as a pair of 6 core Xeons. My
rule of thumb in AWS is that you get about half of what they say you do: so an
8 vCPU instance has about as much power as a 4 core physical server.

And don't even get me started on what they have for hardware costs. I think
they must have pulled list price from Dell or something. I can get prices
about 2/3 to 1/2 of what they're listing from my VAR.

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gaadd33
This doesn't seem useful if you are pricing out anything less than a full (or
multiple) racks of servers.

For 2 servers with moderate specs (8 cores total, 16gb each) it claims the 3
year cost will be $120K. Most of that seems to be due to the assumption that
2U requires a full rack costing $30K up front plus $2.5K/mo in datacenter
costs.

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opendais
It is just a marketing tool.

They conveniently leave out the 'real' competition which is 50%+ utilization
on dedicated server providers. Consistent performance, significantly cheaper.

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Fizzadar
Obviously completely biased. Well utilised hardware or dedicated servers can
easily compete (and blow out of the water at cheaper DC's) on price with AWS
(and then you actually get guaranteed resources).

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dewey
Direct link to the calculator in case you just want to play around with it:
[http://awstcocalculator.com/](http://awstcocalculator.com/)

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ChuckMcM
Thanks for that. Nice that the costs are getting closer, I only have to pay an
extra million dollars a year to host my crawling and indexing infrastructure
in the cloud than to co-locate it by their calc. It would still be impossible
to get the latency I want but that the hardware cost difference is down to
around 20% is a huge improvement.

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benologist
Bit convenient to overlook regular dedicated servers that you can rent from a
bajillion hosting companes, again.

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ChuckMcM
Actually the calculator can do that, but badly. You need to go in and delete
out the 'rack' cost which is typically built in with most Colocation deals.

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opendais
The pricing is still waaaaaaaaaaaaay off. They intentionally left it out
because anyone with high utilization would find the dedicated servers cheaper.

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coldcode
You might get more useful numbers by asking random questions of Mechanical
Turk. TCO estimation is mostly pointless.

