anybody else do a bill comparison

[tfannon]

My little app which was costing me $8.40 per month to keep always-on will now cost me $60 or so.

Sort of disheartening.    :(

The bad thing is I'll bet so much of us have so much time invested it will be hard to walk away.  

Might have to go investigate Azure again.  At the time I looked at it,  the pricing model is what drove me away from that too.

[Tom Carchrae]

Time for my start-up selling Appscale instances on AWS!

More seriously, (and hey, If you make lots of money on that, send me a bone), has anyone tried deploying http://code.google.com/p/appscale/ on AWS and looking at the cost difference in running it.  (and the fact that Appscale devs have said it's experimental only, which is a shame but may be an honest warning (appengine feels like that often too!))   

My impression of the pricing increase (when it was announced a few months ago) was that while a giant leap from beta prices, it was pretty much in line with other cloud computing services.  I know there are some seemingly arbitrary pricing that could screw your app (hello API access), but the actual CPU/storage costs seemed to make it pretty similar to the competition.

If I'm wrong, please tell me where and how much you'd save.

Tom

[Jon Stevens]

That is about the same cost of a micro instance on AWS.

You were getting a discount on a 'beta' product. Now you aren't.

jon

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 4:37 AM, tfannon <tfa...@gmail.com> wrote:

[William Wong]

I'm curious what is the hardware spec of a GAE instance.  I heard someone claimed it has only about 100megs RAM per instance.  AWS micro is $.02/hour and reserved micro is $.013/hour vs GAE instance $.08/hour.

Also the GAE instance-hour is different from AWS instance-hour.  GAE is process-instance-hour and AWS is machine-instance-hour.  You got the whole machine to do other things in AWS case.

[Jon Stevens]

The price at the end of the day is about the same. ~$60 a month.

Jon

Missplet on my ipone

[Ken Bowen]

Jon, William:

We're behind you guys on the development curve, so I haven't thought too much about the cost change.
But could you give us a rough indication how you arrived at $60/month??

Many thanks in advance.
--Ken

[William Wong]

Do you have an analysis to substantiate the claim?

[Jon Stevens]

I'm sure you can read the same pages I do and do the same math.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing

vs.

http://www.google.com/enterprise/cloud/appengine/pricing.html

I've run AWS instances and micro's ended up costing about $50-60/month. The page above also clearly states that a micro 1yr reserved is $54/month. Don't forget that doesn't include charges for EBS, network, load balancer, ip addresses, S3, etc.

But really, you are comparing apples to oranges here. AWS != AppEngine. They are two entirely different products.

First off, when your micro instance dies in the middle of the night (and trust me, it will... I've seen it happen many times now), there isn't someone at AWS who is going to start up a new instance for you. This is something that you are going to have to make happen on your own. The closest thing AWS has to AppEngine is BeanStalk and that is *just* the Tomcat instance and it is *at a minimum* $35/month. http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/#pricing

Never mind all of the API services that app engine provides like http sessions, memcached, datastore, users, etc. All of this is stuff you'd have to setup (AND MANAGE) on your own on AWS. How much is your time worth? Knowing that I'll never have to do IT/sysadmin again is worth WAY more than $50/month.

Stop your bellyaching. If your app can run on appengine, it really is the best priced option out there for what you get when you sit down and really count all the beans on the table.

jon

[William Wong]

All fair points and I appreciate you took the time to give a detail reasoning.  I can see some people are happy with what GAE provides and view the value outweighs the cost.  Anyway, I've decided to move on and migrate all pending projects out of GAE.

BTW, reserved micro is $54/year plus $0.007/hour, which is about $9.6/month for keeping the machine up all the times.

[Jon Stevens]

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 3:57 PM, William Wong <willi...@gmail.com> wrote:

BTW, reserved micro is $54/year plus $0.007/hour, which is about $9.6/month for keeping the machine up all the times.

Again, you are comparing apples to oranges. Factor in EBS storage costs, network, load balancer, getting up in the middle of the night to spin up a new instance... and it is going to cost you more than $10/month.

I also had a lot of issues with AWS where an instance would appear to be up in the dashboard and dead to the world. Good luck debugging those. The only solution there is to spin up a new instance, point your EBS volume at that and hope things work out ok. While it is pretty easy to do, it certainly is not something I'd like to be doing in the middle of the night.

Oh and don't forget about the random performance of AWS. Those micro instances especially have WIDE ranges of IO/network metrics. Basically, you are buying bottom of the barrel on oversold hardware.

Good luck with your migration. Jeff and I are working on a new company and it'll be on AppEngine and I'm very happy about that.

cheers,

jon

[Jon Stevens]

One other thing... if you don't need the same worldwide presence that AWS has and you are just using a micro instance, I'd look into linode instead. Even less expensive than AWS.

jon