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Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached

#12

Post by vessenes »

rbranson wrote: post #9
vessenes wrote: post #5

It would be great, really great, if this were priced per-gigabyte of RAM and per-gig transferred. To my mind, memcache should be billed and used more like a CDN. Until then, this makes sense only for mid-large scale memcache deployments, similar to Amazon's RDS.

Agreed, the value add isn't very high, especially since the pricing is higher than EC2. Surely there are some economies that could be found on servers with no disks and reduced CPU requirements? I wonder if ECC could even be done away with if they checksummed all the stored values? It would be a real killer if they had incremental pricing (per-GB-hour) with an adjustable high watermark / replica count, and a name/por…

I agree, that would be great. Let's start a company that does that.

Re: Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached

#13

Post by harlowja »

gsharma wrote: post #11

I would have liked it a lot more if they launched a Redis like version with persistence storage than memcache. I wonder why they considered Memcache over Redis.

It seems to be a memcache compatible interface. So its really hard to tell what they used underneath the covers. Perhaps a modified memcache for there needs...

Re: Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached

#14

Post by wmf »

robryan wrote: post #6
natrius wrote: post #4

ELB is cheaper than running your own EC2 load balancer, but ElastiCache is more expensive than the same raw EC2 servers. It makes sense, but I was hoping it'd be as much of a no-brainer as ELB was.

You would think they should be able to offer it cheaper, as they will be able organise it to get a lot more users/ CPU usage per server than the usage they would typically get from an average EC2 server.

Not really, considering that RAM is RAM.

Re: Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached

#15

Post by nesbot »

Is there a part of the typical web stack that they don't offer a solution for or does this pretty much cover it. I know you can always run whatever they don't yourself just on another ec2 instance, but I think you can offload everything (but your app) now to their services.

Re: Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached

#16

Post by TomOfTTB »

robryan wrote: post #6
natrius wrote: post #4

ELB is cheaper than running your own EC2 load balancer, but ElastiCache is more expensive than the same raw EC2 servers. It makes sense, but I was hoping it'd be as much of a no-brainer as ELB was.

You would think they should be able to offer it cheaper, as they will be able organise it to get a lot more users/ CPU usage per server than the usage they would typically get from an average EC2 server.

I'm almost certain they could offer it cheaper and have chosen not to. If you look at AWS' history they tend to price higher than they need to and then aggressively lower the prices after the service is established. I've always assumed this is part of a very conservative business plan where they establish the actual cost of running the service (as opposed to projections) over time. Once they've established they can actually run the service as cheaply as projected they lower the price accordingly.

Remember Amazon isn't a startup. It is an established company with shareholders to keep happy. Given that I think the above strategy is a sensible one (and is probably why AWS has been profitable from the very beginning)

Re: Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached

#17

Post by thadeus_venture »

So this is just a simple way to get some memcached instances running. I guess it makes sense for amazon to target memcached since it's still the most popular caching system in use, and probably the easiest for newbies to get into, but it is very old technology at this point. There is no built in support for clustering, replication, or durability. There are solutions out there that provide a much better feature set. Heh, where did the original dynamo paper come from? All in all, underwhelming.

EDIT: I guess i forgot to mention the most obvious reason of all to go with memcached - what they have rolled out is by far the easiest caching system to implement. Not trolling, just stating the facts..

Re: Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached

#18

Post by rbranson »

vessenes wrote: post #12
rbranson wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, the value add isn't very high, especially since the pricing is higher than EC2. Surely there are some economies that could be found on servers with no disks and reduced CPU requirements? I wonder if ECC could even be done away with if they checksummed all the stored values? It would be a real killer if they had incremental pricing (per-GB-hour) with an adjustable high watermark / replica count, and a name/por…

I agree, that would be great. Let's start a company that does that.

At current RAM prices, one can build a cheap 2U SuperServer with 144GB of ECC DDR3 1333MHz RAM, a single quad-core 40W 2.13GHz Westmere processor, a 10gig-E card, and a 4GB CompactFlash drive for ~$4,000. Assuming the server has a 3-year lifespan and costs ~$4,000 to power, cool, house, network, and administer, that's around $0.0021/GB-hr considering 143GB of it is usable. Double that to ~$0.0043 for redundancy, and they could charge $0.02/GB-hr and make a healthy profit.

Edit: Note that a lot of that profit gets eaten up in underutilized capacity, this is just a simplistic analysis.

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