
Amazon EC2 Beta (2006) - Jarred
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon_ec2_beta/
======
throwanem
It'll never take off. Even if people want to use it, which seems doubtful,
there's no way it can ever be economical at scale. Where's the value prop
here?

~~~
bendbro
Ha, were people really saying this back then?

~~~
quonn
No.

~~~
lovelearning
Because there was no HN then :)

------
mmastrac
Fun to look through old EC2 email from back in the day (from 2007):

> We have an account at that is nearing its EC2 limit - we need to be able to
> create more than 20 instances, preferably as many as you can give us. Our
> application is exploding - we're doing well over 5M page views / day and
> it's doubling every 2 or 3 days, so the request is rather urgent. Can you
> have someone call or email us right away?

I remember at that time that it was just so much more expensive than physical
servers at iWeb. Sure it was convenient, but the performance per dollar was
something like 1/3 or 1/4\. Crazy.

~~~
danudey
The value in EC2 has never been in straight up cost, it's been in wild
fluctuations in scale. In sites like Reddit, where your peak traffic can be
10x or 100x what your average traffic is, the ability to scale up to handle
the top 5th percentile without paying a hundred times more year-round is where
savings come in.

Now, though, the benefit in AWS is all the add-ons that you can manage through
the same system; DNS, messaging, databases, firewalls, load balancing, etc.

That said, we massively overprovision our servers at my company and it's still
probably less than half of what we'd pay at Amazon. That pays for my time to
take care of the servers, at least.

~~~
merb
actually renting servers is cheap. however renting a stable network isn't.

when you rent servers you either need a overlay network via a VPN or you end
up renting a rack (1/3, half, full) and connect it yourself. but as you might
guess you are now inside a single datacenter, if it burns or somehow looses
it's connection you are offline. that's not a big deal for some sites, but
some stuff will suffer from that.

AWS and Clouds are more about networks and traffic spikes than just a bunch of
servers. It's also easier to just replace the system in a outage than on most
other services where you mostly try to heal it up. On Clouds you just trash
it. We have some small sites on 3 AWS Small instances and a AWS RDS Master-
Slave. Whenever one instance breaks or AWS makes a notice that this instance
will be recycled we just reprovision it. We are also on AWS Frankfurt which
didn't have a real outage yet. Google pricing would be in favor but no RDS
Postgres yet, same for Azure (even when we get 130 € per month on 7 accounts
for free (startup program) for 3 years or so).

however our software is sold to customers as hardware and not designed to run
on a cloud (yet), mostly because of sensitive data.

------
tootie
Kids today don't remember needing a purchase order to buy hardware that had to
be shipped, racked and configured. Adding scale went from 6 weeks to 6
seconds.

~~~
toomuchtodo
The vast majority of business do not need to scale on a dime.

You're paying 30-40% more to provision in 6 seconds in AWS (and let's be real,
it's low 5 minutes _at least_ for most resources like instances), but if
you've got the cash to waste, go for it.

As always, marketing is key.

~~~
derefr
> and let's be real, it's low 5 minutes at least for most resources like
> instances

If you've got a pre-baked application AMI, are using EBS-backed instances, and
are starting them with auto-scaling or health-checks rather than manually
using the console, then no, you really can have new instances up in a couple
of seconds.

Mind you, the key (to getting a high ROI from AWS) isn't scaling _up_ on a
dime. It's scaling _down_ on a dime, whenever your load decreases for even a
minute or two, knowing you can just scale right back up. Being able to run
with literally no paid compute-hours spent sitting around doing nothing
waiting for a task can save you a rather large amount of money, usually quite
easily compensating for that 30-40% AWS surcharge.

~~~
Alain-lf
AWS charge by the hour, as soon as you power up an instance you are charged a
full hour.

If you start and stop one instance 60 time in an hour, you will be charged 60
hours.

So scaling down on a dime and scalling right back up is more expensive than
doing nothing.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Bingo. If you've scaled up, you stay scaled up for the instance hour.
Otherwise, you just threw money away.

~~~
brianwawok
GCE only need 10 minutes and then you can spin down.

------
cperciva
Hey Jeff, this EC2 thing sounds like exactly what I'm looking for, except that
it seems to be just Linux. I'd like to get FreeBSD running on this instead...
is there someone at Amazon I can talk to about making this happen?

</timemachine>

------
helper
I didn't realise that Jeff Barr has been doing these posts all the way back to
2006.

~~~
jeffbarr
I started writing the AWS Blog way back in November 2004 and am coming up on
2600 posts!

------
blazespin
I really feel for pmarca

~~~
nickpsecurity
What's up with pmarca's website? It gives me a 404 on archive.org all the way
back to 2007. I think that's the first time I've ever one do that using
Wayback. Nothing but 404's.

