I'd really love to jump on EC2, but every time I run the numbers it doesn't add up for my usage.
I currently colocate all my servers and I wanted to figure out just how much it might cost to potentially switch over to EC2. After much digging and benchmarking, it seems that an single ECU is roughly equivalent to 350 to 400 points on PassMark. With this information and load metrics, it is pretty easy to determine what kind of ECUs I might need to switch over (as RAM and disk are pretty straight forward): http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php.
Came to the same conclusion as I did a few years ago. For my scenario (about a rack of servers, established business, 24/7 usage, capacity to handle for a 10-fold increase in usage (and much more within a 2 hour window))... I save roughly $170,000 over 3 years doing it all (server costs included). This is with 3-year reserved instances.
It should be noted that I build our servers from the ground up and do all the ops.
Funny, this is exactly the problem I'm working on with my new project, that I just started rolling out this week (shameless plug): https://uptano.com
I've created setups like yours a bunch of times (anywhere from 10-1000 servers) and always check EC2 to see if it's a viable alternative. The messy details of proper facilities management get old real quick. But, as you say, the math just doesn't work.
With existing companies you end up paying huge premiums to rent virtual instances on heavily shared hardware. You're giving up a proper network (with internal and external connections) and persistent high performance disk I/O. It's just not a great deal.
I'm trying to get it much closer to the pricing of doing it yourself, while keeping the convenience of not having to actually do it all yourself.
Would love to get some feedback from you, if you're willing. No email in your profile. Mine is jake@uptano.com.
The setup took a couple months to research, build, and make "perfect". However, ongoing it takes little time to maintain (less than an hour a week, if averaged). Every three years, I build new servers and place them into service (2 to 3 weeks of time to perform). I also do periodic hardware maintenance roughly every three months (typically 1/4 of a day to perform).
Due to the cost savings, we also are able to do quite a bit of redundancy, such as: dual PSUs, SSDs in RAID 10 on non-SAN servers, RAID-Z2/3 on SAN servers, offsite backups, complete server redundancy, spare servers ready to be slotted (I live an hour from colo), spare parts on hand, even multiple physical colos.
If components are selected carefully (i.e. sharing components between server roles), regular maintenance is performed, and redundancy is ensured on a per component, per server, and per datacenter level, it's not very time intensive or costly.
I am a software engineer by trade, but love the ins and outs of hardware/ops. As such, everything is automated and scripted (that can be). I can raise/move instances in minutes, just like EC2 (currently use XCP).
Even with the research, it still saves roughly 100k per 3 years.
These kinds of numbers scare the shit out of me. Here I am thinking a couple of linodes may cover what I want (am intrigued by uptano (https://uptano.com/) linked above though).
How do I go about estimating my real needs? I mean, I hope you are running some major stuff for money whereby you save $60K a year. Holy shit!
It speaks more towards the outlandish expense of EC2 (for us) than it does the true actual expense.
A few things:
Eliminate the middle men. Who do the small/medium datacenters use to build their custom hosting hardware? It's likely someone like Ma Labs where you get quite a savings over Amazon/Newegg, particularly when you buy components for many servers at a time.
Pay in advance, when it makes sense and is possible. Talk to colo operators, you can likely get a better deal if you pay for 1/3 years up front.
When you build the hardware yourself, you can do things no operator can do for you... tailor it exactly for your own domain needs.
Analyzing your domain needs to define server roles that you might need (e.g. load balancer, app server, relational database, hadoop cluster, nosql database, key/value stores like redis, etc) will lead you to commonalities in hardware/components needs. Now you can develop a few physical server types, order in bulk, and not have to keep so many spare components on hand.
For us, we are able to split out our datacenters by "critical"/"non-critical" for huge cost savings. Our "critical" datacenters host traditional production level servers. Things that MUST have up times of four/five nines. We can get 50Mbps 95th percentile, quarter rack, 10 amp for roughly $400 a month. These are great, but you have to make the most of each U.
We do a lot of machine learning, map/reduce, and general processing. The app needs this, but because I coded for it... if the uptime is, say, 99% and not 99.9999% it has VERY little impact on our end users (think of these as worker dynos). Now, I can have a whole rack here at the office able to handle for 90% of outages without issue. The nice thing about this is, I no longer have to make the most of each U. I can now build servers completely different than I would in a traditional datacenter. It also comes with little added expense to our normal operations (add redundant internet, networking, UPSes, and insurance). I can build a 1u, 25 ECU-equiv, 32GB, SSD based server for ~1.1k. Fill the rack! :)
These sound like excellent pointers. Do you have such large needs because of the type of pages/apps you are serving (streaming, for instance, or heavy analytical processes in the ML), or simply because you have a helluva lot of users?
Try using http://www.cloudorado.com/ . You just specify your requirements (RAM, CPU, subscription duration) and it finds appropriate options for you, including reserved, packages, etc. And it will give you price not only of AWS but other clouds a well.
You get what you pay for. I used to be a dreamhost customer a couple of years ago, tried to actually use the storage tied to my hosting account. Dreamhost threatened to terminate those accounts that used significant amounts of storage (the storage people supposedly "bought" with their hosting account).
I learned my lesson — there is cheap hosting and real hosting. Just as there are "unlimited" data plans (that get capped) and the real ones that you actually pay for. These days I always look for solutions that have a real business model behind them, not overbooked marketing gimmicks. Which means that amazon and rackspace are in, dreamhost is out.
For a 'small timer' like me used to VPS or dedicated local servers it's still a bit confusing.
I don't know how much a value it is, but when looking at PAAS options (like openshift, heroku, appengine, etc.), I like appfog's braindead simple pricing: 2gb free, 4gb $100/month, 16gb $380, etc.
I'm not sure if it's ok, but I'll shamelessly plug our cloud: digitalocean.com. We have really straight forward and easy to understand pricing starting at $5. -- Jeff
I was considering our options for a new setup earlier this month, and considered Linode, AWS, DreamHost's VPS, and DigitalOcean. I found the Amazon pricing so incomprehensible — even though I'm moving an established app, with known traffic and storage — that it was a non-starter.
I went with DigitalOcean and — while I'm still getting the server set up — I've been pleased with it so far. The articles on the site that help with setup are really helpful (like Linode's articles, but more up-to-date, and the prices are both good and simple.
Very cool! This is useful for small deployments. We developed PlanForCloud.com to help with cost forecasting for big deployments, where you want to compare infrastructure options and cloud providers.
Also, don't forget that one of the key benefit of using the cloud is elasticity, and unless you model this, you won't get accurate estimates. We developed the notion of elasticity patterns[1] to let users do this, so you can say something like "my baseline S3 storage is 100GB, but every month this grows by 5% and in the Christmas it doubles".
Great way to make the prices clear. 15% more for Japan, I think it's time to move my things back to US East (Virginia) and make some savings.
It had some pricing on S3 but I think it would be nice to also have the prices for RDS. A medium-sized one of those things costs as much as a medium EC2 instance (yes I learned that the hard way).
Yep, I understand that. Still, spot pricing it relatively consistent over time, with occasional temporary spikes. A dynamic web version with this format would work too. It's less important to me that I can print it out, since I probably would just end up referring to this online as I need it.
If you do more than occasional processing, it's probably worth buying at least light utilisation reservation. Most people who use EC2 professionally (and who don't use spot instances) would or should be paying a reserve price
As dagw said, it pretty much depends on what you're doing.
We have dev, test and stage instances that are almost always off. I'm not going to reserve those at all, because I won't generate enough charge on them over the course of a year to even meet the initial payment.
For our production instances, yes, obviously we're reserving, but there are lots of cases where you wouldn't. Even with production instances, we occasionally spool up another instance to handle load spikes, for which we don't boot a reserved instance.
In another of our apps, we actually spool up a new AWS instance to handle customer requests. The user clicks a button on a website, uploads a (large) file, which we spool up an instance to process for awhile, return the results then shut the instance down. That kind of usage isn't really suitable for reservation.
Everyone reserves instances, but they do other things, too.
You can do a setup based on application demand, such that you have reserved instances for baseline load, and then a mix of spot instances and on-demand instances for load/spikes over baseline.
I currently colocate all my servers and I wanted to figure out just how much it might cost to potentially switch over to EC2. After much digging and benchmarking, it seems that an single ECU is roughly equivalent to 350 to 400 points on PassMark. With this information and load metrics, it is pretty easy to determine what kind of ECUs I might need to switch over (as RAM and disk are pretty straight forward): http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php.
Came to the same conclusion as I did a few years ago. For my scenario (about a rack of servers, established business, 24/7 usage, capacity to handle for a 10-fold increase in usage (and much more within a 2 hour window))... I save roughly $170,000 over 3 years doing it all (server costs included). This is with 3-year reserved instances.
It should be noted that I build our servers from the ground up and do all the ops.