$0.095 * 24 * 30 = $68.40 for 24/7 coverage on a typical month
Sort of pricey for 1.3 GB memory
Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached
31–37 of 37 posts
Re: Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached
#32ELB 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.
Cheaper than running your own _external_ load balancer.
I really wish amazon released an internal only (cross AZ if applicable) load balancer with cheaper transit costs.
Re: Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached
#33It 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.
I have a feeling the pricing on this is going to get revised pretty quickly. Since memcached is so easy to run & cluster, I'm not seeing a reason to rationalize the added expense to have amazon do it.
Re: Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, that would be great. Let's start a company that does that.
The problem is that you need to provide the other services as well. Having your database and application server in one datacenter, but your memcached instance in another would reduce the use-cases because of latency and bandwidth restrictions.
We recently got a step closer to integrating multiple clouds now that EC2 allows peering. http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/ To really make it easy you'd probably want federated auth and billing, but I'm not sure that's in Amazon's interest.
Re: Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached
#35I was excited at first until I realized this is merely just an AWS-managed memcache cluster. I was really hoping for another layer of abstraction away from the server level and more just an interface. More like SimpleDB than RDS to use the AWS analogy.
Interesting. For a key-value store what could be another abstraction though?
rbranon did a better job explaining what I was after than I did
Re: Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached
#36It 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 the value add isn't significantly high for small cluster type of situations, and I would much rather just have a caching API available that charges on usage and allows you to specify an amount of redundancy.
However, the automatic failovers is very nice. From Vogel's blog: "Amazon ElastiCache automatically detects and replaces failed Cache Nodes to protect the cluster from those failure scenarios." That is definitely nice.
Elasticache does seem to be sitting in an awkward middle ground between renting of instances and paying for usage in an API.
Edit: after thinking about it more and reading some of the comments, I think an ideal setup would be an API to a memcached like datastore with buckets so I can specify max-size, redundancy, expiration methods, etc on a per bucket basis. Even nicer setup would be all of that plus redundancy and HA across availability zones and regions.
Re: Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached
#37Earlier 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 the value add isn't significantly high for small cluster type of situations, and I would much rather just have a caching API available that charges on usage and allows you to specify an amount of redundancy. However, the automatic failovers is very nice. From Vogel's blog: "Amazon ElastiCache automatically detects and replaces failed Cache Nodes to protect the cluster from those failure scenarios." That…
> I think an ideal setup would be an API to a memcached like datastore with buckets so I can specify max-size, redundancy, expiration methods, etc on a per bucket basis.
Raising the question of why Amazon didn't adapt its S3 API to the task, and then layer an optional memcached-compatible wrapper on top of it.