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Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

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Re: Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#31

Post by jpalomaki »

stephenr wrote: post #6

I still don’t understand this industry’s obsession with predefined fixed limits on unrelated resources. Just because I want lots of RAM, why do I necessarily need lots of disk and/or lots of transfer? Or vice versa, why do I need to pay for lots of tranfer and RAM to get lots of disk? I get that AWS has separate billing for data, but they still tie CPU, RAM and Disk space together, as do most “traditional” VPS hosts.…

Maybe it is easier to keep the maximum amount of virtual machines running on your hardware when you only offering fixed sizes? You can plan your physical hardware so that there is always certain amount of vms on one host and all CPU/mem/disk is allocated to them.

With more flexible allocation of resources the pool would start to fragment. Without local disk the defragmentation process would be fairly easy as you could just restart the vm's in another host, but local disk makes this more difficult (or more annoying for the customer).

Re: Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#32

Post by teraflop »

kudu wrote: post #10

The question is, why would you use EC2 instead of DigitalOcean?

For applications that don't need guaranteed uptime or SSDs, you can save a lot of money with EC2 spot instances. I can get an m1.large instance and 80GB of EBS storage for about $27/month; comparable specs would cost $80 from DigitalOcean.

Re: Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#34

Post by AsymetricCom »

rspeer wrote: post #25

These costs don't include the cost of provisioned IOPS, right? Without provisioned IOPS, the I/O performance is going to range from "very low" to "low", not "low" to "very high".

Provisioned IOPS is just a method for other large corporations to donate to AWS without C-level approval.

Re: Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#35

Post by immad »

AsymetricCom wrote: post #34
rspeer wrote: post #25

These costs don't include the cost of provisioned IOPS, right? Without provisioned IOPS, the I/O performance is going to range from "very low" to "low", not "low" to "very high".

Provisioned IOPS is just a method for other large corporations to donate to AWS without C-level approval.

what do you mean by donate?

Re: Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#37

Post by monkeyspaw »

AsymetricCom wrote: post #34
rspeer wrote: post #25

These costs don't include the cost of provisioned IOPS, right? Without provisioned IOPS, the I/O performance is going to range from "very low" to "low", not "low" to "very high".

Provisioned IOPS is just a method for other large corporations to donate to AWS without C-level approval.

If you view money spend on reducing risk that ended up not being fulfilled, I believe you are correct.

However, one major component of businesses that private individuals do not understand is the value of risk reduction. In a major sense, many businesses are in the business of reducing or quantifying risk.

To an individual, it may not be worth $100k to make sure everything runs correctly. To a business, that might be an easy decision.

It is especially compounded because private individuals don't typically calculate the cost of their time. If a business can spend $100k to make sure their website doesn't go down, their ROI calculation is: probability_of_downtime * cost_per_unit_downtime + cost_to_fix + cost_to_report_causes + cost_to_explain_why_it_happened.

At $100 - $300 per hour per employee, costs rise FAST.

Businesses need to control risk, and will pay money to do so.

Re: Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#38

Post by monkeyspaw »

ye wrote: post #21

It would be nice to have a column for a 30.44 day cost (average month). EC2 is ridiculously expensive, considering the prices at Linode, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, OVH, LeaseWeb and 100tb.

10x in cost isn't necessarily the most important factor to a business.

From an individual's perspective, that's hard to understand. To a business, it really isn't that difficult to justify the cost.

One of my criticisms of HN commenters is the inability to empathize from a company's POV. Just because it doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean it doesn't make sense!

Companies (especially big ones) have different priorities than individuals. I may think it's stupid to 10x infrastructure costs by using AWS. A company may say "that's 1% of my budget, and it keeps my development running smoothly and developers happy with the familiarity and flexibility. I make that 10x cost back in 30 minutes, every day. Not worth optimizing."

Re: Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#39

Post by AsymetricCom »

immad wrote: post #35
AsymetricCom wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Provisioned IOPS is just a method for other large corporations to donate to AWS without C-level approval.

what do you mean by donate?

As in I give you this money and you make sure I can keep giving you money.
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