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Does Amazon S3 really save money?

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Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?

#31

Post by jodrellblank »

zaidf wrote: post #22

That Amazon S3 is cheaper than traditional dedicated servers is a myth that's been spreading for a while now. You can argue all you want about how reliable and convenient it is. But it's not cheaper. In fact, it can be very expensive especially as you consume more bandwidth and storage.

It's not so much arguing that it is cheaper, but that there is still rationale for choosing it even though it's more expensive.

Of course it gets more expensive the more you use it - but so does doing it yourself. And not on a nice smooth scale, either.

Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?

#32

Post by fubar »

onethumb wrote: post #21

Hey there, I'm the CEO & Chief Geek at SmugMug. You're overlooking a few things: - Amazon keeps at least 3 copies of your data (which is what you need for high reliability) in at least 2 different geographical locations. That's what we'd do ourselves, too, if we continued to use our own storage internally. So your math is off both on the storage costs and then the costs of maintaing two or more datacenters and the ne…

I absolutely love smugmug! You guys rock and its architecture, focus on me, and killer features that will keep me renewing every year.

I also love the way you guys built your business. True pioneers.

Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?

#33

Post by staunch »

callmeed wrote: post #16

SmugMug's cheapest plan is $40/year, which is $3.33 a month S3's most expensive tier is $0.15gb/mo So, not counting bandwidth, a user would have to store roughly 22GB of images to eat up that cost. Being conservative, a high-res JPEG out of camera (12mp) is probably 3mb on average. So, we're talking about over 7,000 images.

Even if they lost a little money on every person who maxes out their account they'd make plenty of excess on the vast majority of people who barely use their account. The same way ISPs rely on oversubscribing their connections.

Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?

#35

Post by zaidf »

jodrellblank wrote: post #31
zaidf wrote: post #22

That Amazon S3 is cheaper than traditional dedicated servers is a myth that's been spreading for a while now. You can argue all you want about how reliable and convenient it is. But it's not cheaper. In fact, it can be very expensive especially as you consume more bandwidth and storage.

It's not so much arguing that it is cheaper, but that there is still rationale for choosing it even though it's more expensive. Of course it gets more expensive the more you use it - but so does doing it yourself. And not on a nice smooth scale, either.

There are certainly many cases for using S3 even though it is more expensive. There is nothing wrong with that.

It's just that I have met way too many people who after describing my situation, one of the first things they say is "have you tried S3? shouldn't it be cheaper?"

Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?

#36

Post by iigs »

brfox wrote: post #23
onethumb wrote: post #21

Hey there, I'm the CEO & Chief Geek at SmugMug. You're overlooking a few things: - Amazon keeps at least 3 copies of your data (which is what you need for high reliability) in at least 2 different geographical locations. That's what we'd do ourselves, too, if we continued to use our own storage internally. So your math is off both on the storage costs and then the costs of maintaing two or more datacenters and the ne…

Great rationale, and it has served you well. I am a happy smugmug user. I have a question about data security. If I wanted the data to be safe (in terms of intellectual property and corporate secrets), what do folks here think about using S3 and EC2? I really like the flexibility of using Amazon instead of buying servers for internal corporate data processing... but is secrecy a good enough reason to keep everything…

IMO it depends on what you're securing. If you have a line of business that is particularly susceptible to espionage and the expected loss would be fatal to the business you obviously shouldn't trust anyone you don't have to. However, be realistic about it: many companies don't have anything of substantial enough value to merit infiltrating Amazon to break in to your server to analyze, and while it's of course possible to statically analyze a filesystem the effort bar is higher than the "I'll just snoop in this user's mailbox" level.

On the other hand, if you're doing anything that is either illegal now or could become unpopular with a government that Amazon could be pressured by, you should consider your data confiscated now. I'm not saying I've heard of Amazon doing it, but there are already enough service provider wiretap and warrant laws out there that you'd never know what hit you if it happened.

Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?

#37

Post by socmoth »

dhotson wrote: post #29
onethumb wrote: post #21

Hey there, I'm the CEO & Chief Geek at SmugMug. You're overlooking a few things: - Amazon keeps at least 3 copies of your data (which is what you need for high reliability) in at least 2 different geographical locations. That's what we'd do ourselves, too, if we continued to use our own storage internally. So your math is off both on the storage costs and then the costs of maintaing two or more datacenters and the ne…

Just curious, do you keep your own backups as well? Do you have any contingency plans for if Amazon's services go down? I'm not trying to be cynical, but I'd hate to be in the position where Amazon has your business by the balls if something goes wrong. How do you guys deal with this?

amazon did go down once. smugmug has a blog post about it and what they did. go google it. the entire blog is amazing and informative and i highly recommend it.

i'd link you, but i'm lazy

Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?

#38

Post by ojbyrne »

ojbyrne wrote: post #30
callmeed wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally haven't seen a lot of 7+mb JPEGs from a 5D but I'm sure it's possible. When I output images from a wedding at level 10, they generally range from 2 to 5mb. My editorial work usually gets exported as tiffs, so those are huge. I'd consider saving your JPEGs at level 10 in Photoshop (max is 12). It's unlikely you'd ever need or notice the difference. In fact, my print lab specifically requests this.

I do always use 12, in fact I generally crop first before reducing the quality. I probably don't notice the difference, but since flickr rescales to make several copies I always felt that uploading at the highest quality was a good idea.

My 5D Mk II just shipped. Right around the time I posted this comment. I feel serendipitous.

Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?

#39

Post by sokoloff »

barryrandall wrote: post #6

The problem is that storage costs are a step function. Once you cross a certain threshold (the threshold depends on your performance requirements a.k.a. IOPS), storage gets Really Freaking Expensive (tm). The steps start to get really, really steep as your capacity increases, and that's just for the primary copy of your data. Once you get into truly large data amounts, other things start to break (RAID 5, RAID 6, tap…

Something about your argument is not making sense. You say that as storage needs increase, the costs go up dramatically (that there are significant DISeconomies of scale).

Yet Amazon is acting as an aggregator of all those ever-increasing storage needs, operating at even higher scale, yet is able to turn a profit providing a service at scale. Amazon almost certainly isn't building their own hardware.

It seems you're arguing in circles somewhere there...

Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?

#40

Post by songism »

socmoth wrote: post #37
dhotson wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, do you keep your own backups as well? Do you have any contingency plans for if Amazon's services go down? I'm not trying to be cynical, but I'd hate to be in the position where Amazon has your business by the balls if something goes wrong. How do you guys deal with this?

amazon did go down once. smugmug has a blog post about it and what they did. go google it. the entire blog is amazing and informative and i highly recommend it. i'd link you, but i'm lazy

http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/02/15/s3-outage-we-werent-...

or maybe this: http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/01/30/amazon-s3-outages-sl...

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