back to article Amazon forms THE VIRTY DOZEN to assassinate rival flash cloud servers

A week after Rackspace launched its own range of flash-stuffed cloud servers, Amazon has come along and, as usual, ruined the market by pushing out a dozen instances that are bigger, faster, and cheaper than what its competitor offers. The new instances were announced by the web bazaar's chief technology officer Werner Vogels …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. K

    30GB of RAM, 320GB of SSD, and 16vCPUs for $1.20 ..

    Based upon a calendar month (24 * 30 * 1.20) usage that would cost $864 per month, or $10368 per year ..

    Makes me piss myself with laughter when cloud-tards call this "economical" - Let me enlighten you, why not consider a server with 2x 10 Core Xeon CPU's, 192Gb RAM and SSD for about the same money..

    1. rav

      Re: 30GB of RAM, 320GB of SSD, and 16vCPUs for $1.20 ..

      "Let me enlighten you, why not consider a server with 2x 10 Core Xeon CPU's, 192Gb RAM and SSD for about the same money.."

      Yes you can buy it.....but who is going to maintain and operate it? At $864 per month you are all in and all done and presumably it is never down. The concept is an outsourced IT department not just data.

      1. K

        Re: 30GB of RAM, 320GB of SSD, and 16vCPUs for $1.20 ..

        Outsourced IT dept? Somebody still needs to manage the VMs and OS configurations, software, database and even the network linking the VMs. All your doing is moving the hardware off premise - but then you loose complete control to have any impact on outages.

        This type of operation is beneficial for some companies who need to scale up and down constantly, but given the clouds selling point of providing an economical platform, this won't cut the mustard for most companies that I work with.

        Off topic, has anybody else noticed the barrage of "Cloud is everything" ad's and articles are decreasing? TFFT!

    2. Graham 24

      Re: 30GB of RAM, 320GB of SSD, and 16vCPUs for $1.20 ..

      There's other costs to consider - primarily power if you're self-hosting. But yes, in general, if you need a server 24/7 for months or years, cloud isn't economical.

      I have a suspicion that one of the reasons this sort of offering succeeds in the marketplace isn't commercial - it's operational. An IT manager would have to jump through lots of bureaucratic hoops to buy that 10-core server of yours, whereas $800 per month can just be put on his corporate VISA. It costs more in the end, but sadly, it's often the case that controls put in place to ensure money isn't wasted end up costing more than they save.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 30GB of RAM, 320GB of SSD, and 16vCPUs for $1.20 ..

      Spoken like someone scared to lose their job to the cloud! (he said, sarcastically)

      Just to pick that apart a bit...(beware, sketchy maths)

      You're assuming 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. So you don't want to go for the hourly option, you want "Reserved Instances". Let's assume you're going for the highest level of reserved instance "Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances". You're now looking at $3726 for the year, or about 40% of the quoted cost.

      If you're committed to buying hardware, you're probably not looking to chuck it away after a year either, right? So you could sign up for a 3 year contract? You're now looking at $5804 for the entire 3 year period - $2000 a year.

      I don't know what the power consumption would be on a server? I dunno, maybe 500w total power consumption? So 3 years * 365 days * 24 hours * 0.5 units an hour (unit being 1 kw/h), google says 43,800 units? British Gas electricity is about 0.15gbp a unit, say a business rate is one third of that (talking out my ass here, I have no idea what business electricity costs), that's 5p a unit, so google says about 2000gbp / 3000usd?

      So now you're down to having $3000 to spend on the server. Not looking so good now, is it? Then take into account the cost of employing someone to maintain it - for arguments sake, we'll assume that you have 1 person doing hardware and 1 doing networking; you keep the networking guy on because as you said somewhere else, you do still need someone on board to do the network config. So you've just lost the hardware guy - maybe $60 000 a year saved there?

      I'm not saying you're completely wrong: in a number of situations, you will be better off buying hardware. But to use the blanket statement '...piss myself with laughter when cloud-tards call this "economical"...' - maybe *some* of the "cloudtards" have actually done their research, and are going down this route because it actually IS economical?

      Or has AWS become as big as it has because NO-ONE uses their products?

      1. disk iops

        Re: 30GB of RAM, 320GB of SSD, and 16vCPUs for $1.20 ..

        AWS is used by people who

        1) don't have IT compute/network staff (or cheaped out and got spaffers)

        2) don't want to enter into long term contracts for CoLo (which may not be available locally)

        3) want to kick developers out of the on-prem equipment and stop being bothered by them

        4) meager capital budgets and/or don't know what they really need HW wise and want ~ZERO lead times if they want to reconfig the mix. aka prototype and what-if

        5) have absolutely massive jobs and BW needs that would be extremely expensive to sink capital into (or sign ISP/CoLo contracts for) when they don't need it steady-state

        6) can't do math

        Where AWS makes little sense is when you have a modicum of sufficiently skilled staff, and a known base load of compute and I/O with reasonable growth rates.

        I've personally moved organizations OUT of AWS for big-Data and other workloads because on-prem was 1/3rd the cost and ran 50%+ faster and more *predictably*. But their big-data wasn't at the mind-blowing scale and it was running continuously. Just 4 months worth of AWS spend bought the entire on-prem stack.

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like