The AWS EC2 Windows Secret Sauce

#1

Post by maishsk » Mon, Mar 18, 2019, 9:00 AM UTC

The AWS EC2 Windows Secret Sauce
technodrone.blogspot.com

Re: The AWS EC2 Windows Secret Sauce

#2

Post by altcognito » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 2:28 PM UTC

It would make sense to apply these optimizations to any kind of startup since presumably anticipating resource allocation ends up as a cost savings and improvement in user experience regardless of the base OS. There are plenty of Linux AMI images that are bloated and slow to start.

Re: The AWS EC2 Windows Secret Sauce

#3

Post by brian_herman__ » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 2:30 PM UTC

Very interesting. Now that 4 minute wait time makes sense now.

Re: The AWS EC2 Windows Secret Sauce

#4

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 2:41 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: The AWS EC2 Windows Secret Sauce

#5

Post by scarface74 » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 2:44 PM UTC

I’ve been a Microsoft developer for over two decades. But once I started architecting solutions on AWS and seeing the Windows Tax first hand - in terms of resource requirements and licensing costs - I started trying to avoid Windows like the plague.

Also the true costs of infrastructure became my problem - accounting can see exactly what a solution costs - instead of some amorphous cost in the IT budget.

Re: The AWS EC2 Windows Secret Sauce

#6

Post by 0x0 » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

Does AWS have to pay a license fee to maintain a pool of Windows instances? Who foots the cost of the license if a prepared/pooled instance is never allocated to a customer?

Re: The AWS EC2 Windows Secret Sauce

#7

Post by simonh » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

altcognito wrote: post #2

It would make sense to apply these optimizations to any kind of startup since presumably anticipating resource allocation ends up as a cost savings and improvement in user experience regardless of the base OS. There are plenty of Linux AMI images that are bloated and slow to start.

It would only be practical to do this for very commonly used AMIs that AWS create and provision themselves. Commonly used because you don't want unused AMIs languishing in the instance pool long term. Only their own, because these AMIs are heavily manipulated and then customised for the user so you have to be positive the AMI is compatible with the manipulations.

I wonder if Azure does something similar.

Re: The AWS EC2 Windows Secret Sauce

#8

Post by jbigelow76 » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 2:58 PM UTC

0x0 wrote: post #6

Does AWS have to pay a license fee to maintain a pool of Windows instances? Who foots the cost of the license if a prepared/pooled instance is never allocated to a customer?

There has to be a custom deal in place, but it could be similar in spirit to a hot standby MS SQL Server instance where you only pay for one license but have a mirror of the machine ready to go if the first one goes down (my knowledge of licensing was only tangential to my dev work and could be several years out of date now).

Re: The AWS EC2 Windows Secret Sauce

#9

Post by jak92 » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 3:06 PM UTC

Shared windows instances? What could go wrong?

Re: The AWS EC2 Windows Secret Sauce

#10

Post by bharrison » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

0x0 wrote: post #6

Does AWS have to pay a license fee to maintain a pool of Windows instances? Who foots the cost of the license if a prepared/pooled instance is never allocated to a customer?

There are MS license agreements for cloud solutions providers that allow license usage up to a certain limit, with monthly reporting of actual usage for billing purposes.