true, that's why you see the diff - 7 times vs 2 - 5 times. point remains, ec2's more expensive when you need to scale. it is break even before full blown infrastructure(network, etc) is needed; when you are small, this is exactly where you save; however, it is dangerous, if you marry to it and then need to scale.
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 9:21 PM, Ori Lahav <ola...@outbrain.com> wrote:Nir 24/7. NOC is a good example for something that is considered as serving costs but its not relevant for this discussion as you have to do it regardless if its EC2 or not. Noc is a significant cost if you choose to do it. BTW We chose not to - just because we are distributed over 2 continents. --- original message --- From: "Nir Yeffet" <ni...@mailnicks.org> Subject: Re: How much does it really cost? Date: 6th January 2011 Time: 2:12:25 amFYI, Mine to you did included also everything you mentioned: 24x7 NOC and monitoring, firewalls, load balancers, switches, cables, ssl and way more. Basically all of operations (no product development) is included: I took the bottom line number.
In our calculations, depend on the application, EC2 came up between 2 to 5 times more expensive. However, sometimes we do use EC2 for burst and quick capacity needs. it is good exactly for that.
My 2 cents..
On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 8:48 AM, Eran Sandler <eran.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
What's the biggest technology mistake you've ever made - either at work or in your own life?
Prior to Facebook, I was the chief executive of a small internet startup called FriendFeed.
When we started that company, we were faced with deciding whether to purchase our own servers, or use one of the many cloud hosting providers out there like Amazon Web Services.
At the time we chose to purchase our own servers. I think that was a big mistake in retrospect. The reason for that is despite the fact it cost much less in terms of dollars spent to purchase our own, it meant we had to maintain them ourselves, and there were times where I'd have to wake up in the middle of the night and drive down to a data centre to fix a problem.
What I realised was that you can't measure the quality of your life in dollars alone. I think that most of the people that worked at FriendFeed would agree that if that part of the company were just taken care of, it would have been worth all of the extra money we would have spent on it.
Very few of the startups I know in Silicon Valley actually purchase their own servers now, they're using these cloud hosting providers, and I wish we had as well.
A better question to ask is how much you enjoyed dealing with the
operations stuff before you had a sysadmin?