Amazon EC2 hosting services viability

[Steve Onnis]

I have been looking at the EC2 services and trying to work out if it
is cost effective or not and so far it is coming way short.

I am running windows servers and based on the calculator at
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html is will cost between
$450 and $500 per month per instance to host, plus an extra $50ish for
data. I have a rack with 7 servers and a few VMs running other
services, so based on those numbers, to move my whole network into
the cloud it will cost me over $6,000.00 to move my network into the
cloud.

So i guess the question is, where do the savings come from? Just from
bandwith? I appreciate there is the whole on demand elastic side of
it but from a cost-benefit perspective, is it really worth it?

Has anyone done the move and actually found cost benefits?


Steve

[Chris Velevitch]

Whilst I haven't moved to the cloud, a couple of questions come to mind.

You haven't indicated what you currently spending per month to run
your current system and if you own the hardware. If you own the
hardware, have you factored in the replacement costs and the costs to
upgrade the hardware and how often you replace your hardware. With
Amazon, I suspect the hardware is consistently being upgraded the only
effort on your part is to stop, move and restart an instance and
you've upgraded.

Chris
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[Chong]

I have an ex colleague that work projects uses EC2... how do you arrive at 450-500 per instance excluding data?

With my discussions with him and a few others, it is very hard to estimate your actual usage till you get on it. 

For me the potential lies in

• Ability to exist beyond different regions (the likely hood of all the datacenters going down in all the region is very very small)
• scalable (you can switch the instance type, and I also believe there is the ability to create/increase capacity via code/conditions)
• Not needing to worry about hardware
  

So for my understand so far, for you to get maximum benefit from EC2 is to architect the app/site  whereby it can exists between different "regions" , know how to interface with EC2 to scale when needed... not needing to worry about hardware is common with any hosting provider, cloud or non cloud.

Besides the fact that it is cheaper, due to scale of economics.

Just my uneducated 2 cents :)

[Steve Onnis]

That's just it though.

I own all of my hardware outright, so the only costs at the moment for
us is the data centre costs which current is a little over 2k a month
and includes 100 Gb of data. I have full control of security,
firewalls, the servers, environments and if needed i can walk up to
the server, plug a USB drive in and either do backups or transfer
large amounts of data to my servers. I have a full rack available to
me and i agree that if i was looking to expand, then the cost of
hardware will be more than a new instance in the cloud.

Looking at the figures starting out fresh, the TCO is much higher with
the typical data centre infrastructure on a hardware level and
possible hardware maintenance level but the ongoing costs of a cloud
seems to be just as high or higher than traditional data center
services for running systems.

Yes cloud scaling is nice but when then ongoing costs of basic
infrastructure ends up being more what would be the compelling
argument to move to a cloud?

Steve

On Sep 8, 11:43 am, Chong <kck...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have an ex colleague that work projects uses EC2... how do you arrive at
> 450-500 per instance excluding data?
>
> With my discussions with him and a few others, it is very hard to estimate
> your actual usage till you get on it.
>
> For me the potential lies in
>

>    - Ability to exist beyond different regions (the likely hood of all the

>    datacenters going down in all the region is very very small)

>    - scalable (you can switch the instance type, and I also believe there is

>    the ability to create/increase capacity via code/conditions)

>    - Not needing to worry about hardware

[Barry Beattie]

Steve:

what's the Data Center's/your's disaster recovery plan?**

How critical is it for you to deliver, say, 99.5% (or whatever in your
SLA) uptime to your customers?

no criticism, not having a go, just curious if these are factors to
consider (what you've got Vs what EC2 can do for you).

me: no affil/bias either way.

B

** IIRC, there were a couple of P-o-P's inside the WTC ... until Sept
11, that is (it's all about managing risk... and sometimes mitigating
all the risk just costs too much to be competitive in business)

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[Steve Onnis]

my disaster plan is an open ended ticket to mexico! :) kidding

bi-daily backups etc....

The thing is even with all those backup plans it just adds more to the
costs of running in a cloud.

[Blair McKenzie]

As far as I can tell there are three main advantages of "cloud" infrastructure, and others have already mentioned most of them:
1) you don't have to manage your own hardware
2) pay by the hour - good for development, and ties into #3
3) you can bring up new instances effectively instantly - both adding more servers to handle load, and removing unused instances to reduce cost

If you don't need for any of those, then you probably shouldn't go with EC2.

Blair

[Steve Onnis]

Yes paying by the hour is great but when you are using them as
production instances which need to be up 24/7 then the paying by the
hour doesn't really come into it.

[Paul Kukiel]

Steve Take a look at Rackspace cloud options.  I've been looking at them and chatting with Phil and they are also really good value for money and they don't loose your data like Amazon do upon restart.

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/

Paul.

--
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[Mark Mandel]

Amazon doesn't lose your data on restart if you use EBS...

Mark

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 3:59 PM, Paul Kukiel <kuk...@gmail.com> wrote:

Steve Take a look at Rackspace cloud options.  I've been looking at them and chatting with Phil and they are also really good value for money and they don't loose your data like Amazon do upon restart.

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[Andrew Scott]

Steve, I have to agree with where you are coming from. When you compare physical to virtual, it does seem very expensive to run.

But I also understand the benefits that Virtual gives you as well, and I am with you in that I am not sure that for small and I refer to you as small in the space of it all, could justify the cost of Cloud Computing.

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[Josh Wines]

Don't forget to also look into Amazon's 'Reserved Instance' pricing as that is a much more cost effective solution when running instances, especially 24/7.

[Paul Kukiel]

Sure but its not just simply setup and your database is persistent you need to offload to EBS at intervals or snap shot the instance.  Where as rackspace is more like a typical VPS/colo machine just in an elastic environment.

I'm just saying this is something to consider when making the move

Paul

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[Mark Mandel]

Yeah, to replace an entire hosting setup, it may not be cost effective. But for specific applications, it can make a lot of sense when you look at the wider functionality available.

If you are looking at massive dips and spikes in traffic - you can't go past being about to expand and collapse in the cloud (Elastic Load Balancer).

If you are going to do massive asynchronous batch processing of data off and on - spot instances make a lot of sense here.

You need a CDN - cloudfront makes a lot of sense, building your own would suck

Massive MySQL replication - RDS can make a lot of sense (although their performance on mySQL isn't crash hot in my experience).

If you want to split up your application into lots of micro boxes that each have their own tasks - SQS and Micro Instances, are awesome. (Trickier to do this on traditional architectures).

The list goes on.

It's pretty neat set of tools, but if you were to look at it as a straight 'I have a server here, vs I have a server somewhere in the sky', it doesn't necessarily match up.

Mark

[Mark Mandel]

Well, you can use RDS or Oracle offerings.

But if you have an EBS based AMI, what is the issue there? It's persistent between restarts in my experience (I tend to only host websites on them, not DBs)

I rebooted our stage server yesterday, and it came back just fine with everything on it.

So....? Colour me confused?

Mark

[Paul Kukiel]

No Issue its just different.  Ie you can just install SQL server, put data in the database, shut down the instance fire it back up again the next day and expect the data to be there.

At rackspace it does work like this however.

Paul.

[Sean Corfield]

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 6:10 PM, Steve Onnis <st...@cfcentral.com.au> wrote:
> I am running windows servers and based on the calculator at
> http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html is will cost between
> $450 and $500 per month per instance to host, plus an extra $50ish for
> data.

Could you provide a bit more detail on how you arrived at those numbers?

I suspect you're assuming a much larger instance than you really need.

The real key with EC2 is figuring out a minimal baseline to deal with
your "quiet time" and then scaling up when you need it. The "cloud"
isn't a great replacement for your data center unless your traffic is
low by default - where you don't need your full data center - but has
spikes which are as high or higher than your data center capability.

Where I work, our traffic is seasonal: substantially higher in winter
than summer. That means we could scale cloud hosting to our summer
traffic and add capability in the winter. We could probably save a
boatload of money.

Also, if you're comparing managed services to cloud services, the
cloud will look attractive - but if you're comparing bare bones VPS or
dedicated servers that you fully manage yourself, the cloud will look
expensive.

Over the last four years, I've run production infrastructure in a
combination of cloud, data center, and local servers. Every situation
is different but you need to weigh up all the costs (and benefits).
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[charlie arehart]

Adding to all the helpful replies form others on this, I'll add that just
last night at the Atlanta CFUG we had a really well-informed speaker, a
long-time CFer who has done a lot of work with redeployment of CF and Railo
servers to Amazon's cloud offering. I'm hoping to have him present his talk
on the Online CFMeetup sometime soon. It was really well-received.

In the meantime, Steve, his name is Jeremy Bruck, and he does consulting to
help people move to the cloud. I'm sure he'd welcome you reaching out to see
how he can help (in...@growstrategy.com).

/charlie