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EC2 Price Reduction (C4, M4, and T2 Instances)

aws.amazon.com

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Re: EC2 Price Reduction (C4, M4, and T2 Instances)

#21

Post by gtsteve »

dx034 wrote: post #15
TheHydroImpulse wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you need to add another server, or 10 or 100... Not to mention it's another set of skills you need to have. It's a tradeoff. (I'm not talking about "we may need 100 servers next year because we'll have all this traction by then" -- I'm talking about "our load is growing at 1.5x every month or next month we need X capacity") I just finished booting up two new clusters with 5 and 15 nodes, respectively and cycled…

Most startups hope that they'll suddenly need to increase capacity by 100x, but it nearly never happens. Most vendors can provide dedicated servers within a few minutes (if you don't order too many at once), so scaling is still possible in the vast majority of cases. Even if you always have to scale up for 1-2 hours per day, using dedicated hardware that's idle the rest of the day is probably cheaper in most cases.

There are other benefits also:

1. You can get started for dirt-cheap or in some cases, free

2. There's a common API for requesting new instances and performing maintenance tasks

3. There are extra services available to help build your apps such as SES, S3, and RDS to name but a few I found very helpful.

I'm not saying anything in this thread is wrong. But in software engineering, we say "write the code that only you can write", which is a suggestion (but not a rule) to use pre-built libraries instead of trying to make your own. Perhaps we should also say, "run the instances that only you can run".

Re: EC2 Price Reduction (C4, M4, and T2 Instances)

#22

Post by TheHydroImpulse »

dx034 wrote: post #15
TheHydroImpulse wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you need to add another server, or 10 or 100... Not to mention it's another set of skills you need to have. It's a tradeoff. (I'm not talking about "we may need 100 servers next year because we'll have all this traction by then" -- I'm talking about "our load is growing at 1.5x every month or next month we need X capacity") I just finished booting up two new clusters with 5 and 15 nodes, respectively and cycled…

Most startups hope that they'll suddenly need to increase capacity by 100x, but it nearly never happens. Most vendors can provide dedicated servers within a few minutes (if you don't order too many at once), so scaling is still possible in the vast majority of cases. Even if you always have to scale up for 1-2 hours per day, using dedicated hardware that's idle the rest of the day is probably cheaper in most cases.

Oh, for sure. A lot of startups don't need that ability. I work for a pretty infra heavy startup so AWS is simply required at this point. But we've hit AWS capacity limits during the worst times (one of our clusters processing 20k events/sec hit 100% utilization) and they literally had no capacity left for that instance type. It's not a perfect thing all the time.

But in the end, the pros significantly outweigh the cons. Our resource consumption is naturally extremely elastic. While we'll always need to slightly over-provision to maintain some headroom, adding/removing nodes throughout the variance saves quite a bit of $.

Re: EC2 Price Reduction (C4, M4, and T2 Instances)

#23

Post by elcct »

dx034 wrote: post #18
rubber_duck wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you can buy couple of dedicated servers You can rent them too, like here : https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/ (not affiliated, would like to know of other decent hosts too) - I think this is the best of both worlds (don't need to deal with HW, getting bare mettal perf and reasonable prices)

OVH is another decent host at similar prices. They have a larger range of servers and more datacenters, but are slightly more expensive. But they also offer renting older servers at kimsufi (similar to Hetzner's server bidding).

Online.net also offers great value for money

Re: EC2 Price Reduction (C4, M4, and T2 Instances)

#24

Post by TheHydroImpulse »

elcct wrote: post #20
dx034 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most startups hope that they'll suddenly need to increase capacity by 100x, but it nearly never happens. Most vendors can provide dedicated servers within a few minutes (if you don't order too many at once), so scaling is still possible in the vast majority of cases. Even if you always have to scale up for 1-2 hours per day, using dedicated hardware that's idle the rest of the day is probably cheaper in most cases.

You can also rent VPS servers that are still cheaper than AWS temporarily and add them to the cluster whilst waiting for dedicated hardware.

Unfortunately, mixing and matching ends up really complicating things especially with security in mind. Many people run within a VPC and bridging to another private network is, well, I don't really want to think about it at this time.

Re: EC2 Price Reduction (C4, M4, and T2 Instances)

#25

Post by TheHydroImpulse »

windowsworkstoo wrote: post #14
TheHydroImpulse wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you need to add another server, or 10 or 100... Not to mention it's another set of skills you need to have. It's a tradeoff. (I'm not talking about "we may need 100 servers next year because we'll have all this traction by then" -- I'm talking about "our load is growing at 1.5x every month or next month we need X capacity") I just finished booting up two new clusters with 5 and 15 nodes, respectively and cycled…

This argument always comes out when someone points out how much bare metal stomps AWS. Here are some counterpoints a) A large portion of AWS hosted stuff probably doesnt need that level of sudden, burst scaling b) With something like SoftLayer/IBM you can scale physical servers, usually within 30 - 60 minutes c) If your burst scaling requirement are temporary, if you are located in a decent DC, you can probably spin…

a) I don't really have a good enough sample size but I'd imagine a lot don't.

The biggest selling point of AWS is everything around it. You don't just get EC2, you get Route53, ELB, VPC, RDS, S3, CloudFront (although it's kinda expensive), ECS, etc... If I can pay AWS to do something instead of building it, I'll do it.

Re: EC2 Price Reduction (C4, M4, and T2 Instances)

#26

Post by csomar »

elcct wrote: post #6

Software for bare metal is catching up - you can buy couple of dedicated servers, install something like Kubernetes and will be shaking your head in disbelief how much you over paid for AWS.

DockerCloud allows you to deploy to AWS/DigitalOcean. It is server hosting agnostic. That is if the Ocean is cheaper, you can simply switch from the Amazon.

This will be a deal breaker in the future.

Amazon is being disrupted with the same tech it used for disrupting the other players.

Re: EC2 Price Reduction (C4, M4, and T2 Instances)

#27

Post by kchoudhu »

TheHydroImpulse wrote: post #24
elcct wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also rent VPS servers that are still cheaper than AWS temporarily and add them to the cluster whilst waiting for dedicated hardware.

Unfortunately, mixing and matching ends up really complicating things especially with security in mind. Many people run within a VPC and bridging to another private network is, well, I don't really want to think about it at this time.

We've found OpenVPN to be our friend here: create an overlay network that doesn't really care if nodes are bare metal or "cloud".

Re: EC2 Price Reduction (C4, M4, and T2 Instances)

#28

Post by elcct »

TheHydroImpulse wrote: post #24
elcct wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also rent VPS servers that are still cheaper than AWS temporarily and add them to the cluster whilst waiting for dedicated hardware.

Unfortunately, mixing and matching ends up really complicating things especially with security in mind. Many people run within a VPC and bridging to another private network is, well, I don't really want to think about it at this time.

That's the thing - it is much easier nowadays. Kubernetes requires your containers to run on flat shared networking namespace, so your new machine joins that network. It is like running within VPC. Software like Rancher makes the process of adding new server a matter of executing a one liner on server.

Re: EC2 Price Reduction (C4, M4, and T2 Instances)

#29

Post by tachion »

dx034 wrote: post #18
rubber_duck wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you can buy couple of dedicated servers You can rent them too, like here : https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/ (not affiliated, would like to know of other decent hosts too) - I think this is the best of both worlds (don't need to deal with HW, getting bare mettal perf and reasonable prices)

OVH is another decent host at similar prices. They have a larger range of servers and more datacenters, but are slightly more expensive. But they also offer renting older servers at kimsufi (similar to Hetzner's server bidding).

'Friends dont let friends use OVH'. Just google OVH and how horrible they are, every few months they have some gigantic filure - last time I've heard it was taking people money and not delivering servers for MONTHS.

Re: EC2 Price Reduction (C4, M4, and T2 Instances)

#30

Post by fulafel »

gtsteve wrote: post #16
nodesocket wrote: post #8

Arggg, does not apply to west coast instances (us-west-1 and us-west-2).

Asking as an ignorant foreigner: Does anyone know what makes us-west more expensive than us-east? Is it just land or electricity prices or something like that?

It's near rich SV customers, so maybe customer value due to latency?
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