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EC2 Dedicated Hosts

aws.amazon.com

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Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#91

Post by triggercut »

This is great for (warning: potentially limited use case ahead) engineering companies* who run large analysis clusters for specialty Simulation/CFD software. Especially those frustrated by their vendors current or (non-existent) cloud processing offerings.

A lot of software in this space, for instance, has a fixed MAC address requirement for their license servers, and you report/pay depending on the number of cores. Whilst you can get around that sometimes, it would certainly void agreements and wouldn't hold up in an audit.

In some companies I've worked, this could drastically reduce the capital costs for engineers needing overpowered workstations that are analogous to Ferraris you only take out on weekends.

*who are already using AWS in other parts of their infrastructure.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#92

Post by Sanddancer »

abrookewood wrote: post #69

How exactly is this different from Dedicated Instances (which have been around for years)? "Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 instances that run on single-tenant hardware dedicated to a single customer. They are ideal for workloads where corporate policies or industry regulations require that your EC2 instances be physically isolated at the host hardware level from instances that belong to other customers. Dedicated…

This basically lets you have an entire machine dedicated to a specific type of VM instance, plus have the underlying hardware information, to ease licensing requirements that certain programs and operating systems have. So you can get a box of m4.larges and know exactly what programs are running on it; for example, RedHat offers per-vm server licensing, so running 20 instances on RHEL on your dedicated box just costs you the flat rate VM host cost.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#93

Post by Sanddancer »

bonobo3000 wrote: post #51
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #6

Man, I'd really like to just see bare metal from them. To me that was part of the allure of containers -- so much more efficient than multiple VMs and yet you get a lot of similar benefits, as long as you don't mind some security tradeoffs. Running ECS is cool and all, and I know they do some container-specific VM optimizations, but I still know I'm running a kernel on a kernel, even if my VMs happen to share a host.…

Would you mind explaining a little about how bare metal is different from this? Isn't a dedicated host a real physical machine?

This is giving you control of the allocation on one specific VM host. So you have, for example, a box that is hosting x m4.larges that you can fill how you want. Plus you have information about the hardware, so software that's licensed per physical machine can be run on each of those instances.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#94

Post by idlewords »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #79
idlewords wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner.de is a good place to rent a dedicated machine that is fairly configurable.

I know Hetzner, but I didn't think they had any datacenters in the US.

I don't believe they do. If you want a US datacenter, consider LeaseWeb. They're a Dutch company but offer servers in DC and San Jose.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#95

Post by idlewords »

vosper wrote: post #36
fpp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their example dedicated host adds up to $2'226 per month - had a quick calc on the retail HW cost for a machine like this - should not be more than $6.5k with 2 * E5-2670 v3 12 cores. What I understand so far - it is physically bundling a fixed amount of virtual machines to a physical host - in the example "dedicated host" 22 * m4.large. Bundling your virtual machine to one or a series of physical hosts / on the same…

Except, of course, that for anything important you'll want redundancy and failover in the face of hardware failure, so you'll need two of those $6.5k servers.

The same (kind of specious) argument applies to the AWS case.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#96

Post by Spooky23 »

abrookewood wrote: post #69

How exactly is this different from Dedicated Instances (which have been around for years)? "Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 instances that run on single-tenant hardware dedicated to a single customer. They are ideal for workloads where corporate policies or industry regulations require that your EC2 instances be physically isolated at the host hardware level from instances that belong to other customers. Dedicated…

It probably allows you to run your Oracle workloads.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#97

Post by tekism »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #6

Man, I'd really like to just see bare metal from them. To me that was part of the allure of containers -- so much more efficient than multiple VMs and yet you get a lot of similar benefits, as long as you don't mind some security tradeoffs. Running ECS is cool and all, and I know they do some container-specific VM optimizations, but I still know I'm running a kernel on a kernel, even if my VMs happen to share a host.…

What do you mean bare metal? Does that mean physical server?

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#99

Post by motoboi »

jeffbarr wrote: post #16
idlewords wrote: post #5

All the advantages of a dedicated server without the hassle of saving tons of money.

Many of our customers have asked for this feature so that they can run software that is licensed for a particular piece of actual hardware.

Could you list some examples?

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#100

Post by vosper »

idlewords wrote: post #95
vosper wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, of course, that for anything important you'll want redundancy and failover in the face of hardware failure, so you'll need two of those $6.5k servers.

The same (kind of specious) argument applies to the AWS case.

Maybe - I have a number of services that can tolerate a small amount of downtime if they fail, during which I would spin up a replacement AWS server. 99% of the time I'm only paying for the one machine that's running. These would all need dedicated hardware failovers if they weren't hosted in AWS (the same system does have hardware components, and they either have redundant failovers that are mostly idle, or for clusters we run at 66% capacity to allow for failure. Either way, it's often not true that one hardware instance can be substituted for one AWS instance, unless you don't care about long downtime when the hardware fails).
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