

How Amazon Followed Google Into the World of Secret Servers (2012) - ignoramous
http://www.wired.com/2012/11/amazon-google-secret-servers/

======
rrggrr
I read this article and see a future in which Google, Amazon and Goldman are
at full stop because a bulk of these machines shipped with an embedded
killswitch in the NIC or motherboard. I hope a random sample is being tested
with regularity.

------
johansch
"As University of California, Berkeley, computer science professor David
Patterson points out, Amazon Web Services were remarkably cheap from the very
beginning, and the prices continue to drop."

Errmm.. no?

~~~
autokad
I was thinking that myself. I have been using it since 2010, and prices since
then are down by seemingly 50% and still expensive - so in the beginning, no
it was not cheap. The IO is both bad and unpredictable, and even high costs
instances are highly variable in performance on the same instance cost.
meanwhile, their numbers are far bellow that of a hard machine you own, or get
from a rackspace company.

they do save a lot of money if you do not need to hire certain types of IT
fokes, and aws is extremely cost effective for satisfying the need when you
have low traffic and then sudden large bursts of it that must be handled.

~~~
hellbanner
What do you recommend for hosting?

~~~
devonkim
I've been looking at vultr alongside a Linode account for development and
small website hosting purposes that need a little more customization and
server side control than something like a Jekyll blog. AWS S3 is fairly
reasonable for hosting small, static sites that get almost no hits besides you
maybe ahead of almost everyone because most will charge you for the compute
and memory of the web server of the site hosting the content while with it's
stripped to transfer and static disk storage, which would be pennies per year
for sharing a small collection of pictures with a few friends. I have
gigabytes of stuff and it costs me less than a dollar per month on S3.
Expensive if you look at Google Drive or OneDrive costs sure, but the utility
I get out of it is worth a few dollars per year for me. Also, I like the
security I can tweak on my bucketa.

With the HA design you tend to need running on AWS for serious operations (AZs
out the wazoo with every other feature tacking on a few dollars at a time),
you might as well use multiple cloud hosting providers and load balance across
them. Obviously this isn't typical practice, but Amazon's lock-in is pretty
glaring when looking at one of the best potential aspects of cloud being that
of PORTABLE workloads.

