6 ms·

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

agopaul 11y ago
Well, dedicated hardware for EC2 makes sense for certain workloads (eg when you need more predictable performance), considering that you can use them alongside other AWS services (EBS, RDS, Route 53, S3, etc). Plus allocating 'bare metal' VMs on demand via script/API is a big plus. It would be interesting to see how much you can squeeze the dedicated hardware with the largest EC2 types though.
- bkeroack 11y ago
  This is very far from 'bare metal'.
jeffbarr 11y ago
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.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  To think of it another way, smaller companies might save money by buying bare metal and renting colo space. But larger companies would spend more just managing the separate bill for the colo, not to mention the logistics of another datacenter.
  - iofj 11y ago
    Given that there is a 10x price difference in some cases, I would doubt this. The bigger a company is, the more sense colo or dedicated makes. You don't have to manage a datacenter just because you don't go for Amazon. There's tons of companies that will do it for you, at various levels. You want colo space, nothing more ? Fine. You want dedi hosts with a few of your own machines in between ? No problems. On top of that, a lot of dedicated server companies will have spare instance so spinning up new devices is certainly easy enough. Feel free to contact me if you need solutions like this. I think there's one huge advantage of Amazon : management effectively doesn't get to set policy on the datacenter, so they don't get to screw it up. An internal company department would use something like VMWare and won't let you spin something up without endless approvals, whereas Amazon treats you like a customer.
- cortesoft 11y ago
  So it is a feature designed for a silly license scheme?
  - blantonl 11y ago
    I don't mean this to sound condescending, but you have a lot to learn about software licensing. There are many software packages that are licensed to an individual peice of hardware. Tied to that are USB authentication dongles, and even parallel port dongles for some old school commercial software.
    - insertnickname 11y ago
      That sounds like a silly license scheme to me.
    - cortesoft 11y ago
      Yep, you sounded condescending. I think after 25 years in the industry I know a lot about software licensing. Enough to know that just because lots of software packages are licensed that way doesn't change the fact that they are silly.
  - dagw 11y ago
    Silly license schemes are annoyingly common and being able to deal with silly license schemes is a massive killer feature for very many people.
- motoboi 11y ago
  Could you list some examples?
  - modoc 11y ago
    Many Oracle products must be licensed for all the physical hardware they run on, irrespective of VMs (unless you're running OracleVM).
fpp 11y ago
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 network segment is a service you can have from quite a few hosting providers (if you ask). If you opt for a solution like this, it is also most likely that you will run an enterprise scale solution and you will do so for quite some time - at least 6 months upwards. Keeping that in mind together with a lifetime of at least 2 years for such HW, you will be paying 8 times the HW cost for a 2y lifetime for a management layer (storage / connectivity you pay per GB with EC2). I guess everybody will have to see how this fits into their business model for non volatile / predictable resource demand or a set of when physical iron might be a better choice (colo or rent).
- brianwawok 11y ago
  What if the license of the software you want to run is 100k per physical host? Then being able to run 2 or 4 instances on the same physical host makes the $2226 cost pretty insignificant.
  - dsr_ 11y ago
    If you have software that costs that much, you will want to run it on hardware optimized for that software. (Does it want lots of GPU cores? I/O? Raw computrons? Does it prefer more cores or more GHz/core?) Unless Amazon happens to have exactly what you want available, you'll be better off putting it in a lab or datacenter.
    - brianwawok 11y ago
      Maybe, maybe not. Just because software cost a lot does not mean it is super high performance. Some is awful php strung together hacks, but if it does what a customer wants - it may be worth 100k to them.
    - deleted 11y ago
lobster_johnson 11y ago
Are there any good, dependable, modern alternatives if you don't want to deal with the hardware, and also don't need "scale on demand"? The only name I know is SoftLayer, which is certainly not cheap.
- idlewords 11y ago
  Hetzner.de is a good place to rent a dedicated machine that is fairly configurable.
  - lobster_johnson 11y ago
    I know Hetzner, but I didn't think they had any datacenters in the US.
    - idlewords 11y ago
      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.
      - lobster_johnson 11y ago
        Looks alright, but their server selection is a bit limited (and hard to navigate, just a big list that doesn't even filter properly). For example, if I want 128GB RAM and SSD disks, their prices suddenly go up to thousands of dollars per month because they're all some kind of beefy Dell or HP, whereas Hetzner can give me a single-processor, 6-core Xeon E5-1650 3.4GHz + 128GB RAM + 960GB SSD for $123/mo. LeaseWeb has cheaper SuperMicros, but they either max out at 32GB, or they don't have SATA disks. They're skewed very differently: With Hetzner you can't pick "less RAM, lots of CPUs" and LeaseWeb doesn't have "lots of RAM, fewer CPUs, SSDs". A vendor like this needs to offer a much wider range of specs to be worth investing one's entire infrastructure in, to be honest.
        idlewords 11y ago

Well, dedicated hardware for EC2 makes sense for certain workloads (eg when you need more predictable performance), considering that you can use them alongside other AWS services (EBS, RDS, Route 53, S3, etc). Plus allocating 'bare metal' VMs on demand via script/API is a big plus. It would be interesting to see how much you can squeeze the dedicated hardware with the largest EC2 types though.

bkeroack 11y ago
This is very far from 'bare metal'.

jeffbarr 11y ago

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.

stephengillie 11y ago
To think of it another way, smaller companies might save money by buying bare metal and renting colo space. But larger companies would spend more just managing the separate bill for the colo, not to mention the logistics of another datacenter.
- iofj 11y ago
  Given that there is a 10x price difference in some cases, I would doubt this. The bigger a company is, the more sense colo or dedicated makes. You don't have to manage a datacenter just because you don't go for Amazon. There's tons of companies that will do it for you, at various levels. You want colo space, nothing more ? Fine. You want dedi hosts with a few of your own machines in between ? No problems. On top of that, a lot of dedicated server companies will have spare instance so spinning up new devices is certainly easy enough. Feel free to contact me if you need solutions like this. I think there's one huge advantage of Amazon : management effectively doesn't get to set policy on the datacenter, so they don't get to screw it up. An internal company department would use something like VMWare and won't let you spin something up without endless approvals, whereas Amazon treats you like a customer.
cortesoft 11y ago
So it is a feature designed for a silly license scheme?
- blantonl 11y ago
  I don't mean this to sound condescending, but you have a lot to learn about software licensing. There are many software packages that are licensed to an individual peice of hardware. Tied to that are USB authentication dongles, and even parallel port dongles for some old school commercial software.
  - insertnickname 11y ago
    That sounds like a silly license scheme to me.
  - cortesoft 11y ago
    Yep, you sounded condescending. I think after 25 years in the industry I know a lot about software licensing. Enough to know that just because lots of software packages are licensed that way doesn't change the fact that they are silly.
- dagw 11y ago
  Silly license schemes are annoyingly common and being able to deal with silly license schemes is a massive killer feature for very many people.
motoboi 11y ago
Could you list some examples?
- modoc 11y ago
  Many Oracle products must be licensed for all the physical hardware they run on, irrespective of VMs (unless you're running OracleVM).

fpp 11y ago

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 network segment is a service you can have from quite a few hosting providers (if you ask). If you opt for a solution like this, it is also most likely that you will run an enterprise scale solution and you will do so for quite some time - at least 6 months upwards. Keeping that in mind together with a lifetime of at least 2 years for such HW, you will be paying 8 times the HW cost for a 2y lifetime for a management layer (storage / connectivity you pay per GB with EC2). I guess everybody will have to see how this fits into their business model for non volatile / predictable resource demand or a set of when physical iron might be a better choice (colo or rent).

brianwawok 11y ago
What if the license of the software you want to run is 100k per physical host? Then being able to run 2 or 4 instances on the same physical host makes the $2226 cost pretty insignificant.
- dsr_ 11y ago
  If you have software that costs that much, you will want to run it on hardware optimized for that software. (Does it want lots of GPU cores? I/O? Raw computrons? Does it prefer more cores or more GHz/core?) Unless Amazon happens to have exactly what you want available, you'll be better off putting it in a lab or datacenter.
  - brianwawok 11y ago
    Maybe, maybe not. Just because software cost a lot does not mean it is super high performance. Some is awful php strung together hacks, but if it does what a customer wants - it may be worth 100k to them.
  - deleted 11y ago

lobster_johnson 11y ago

Are there any good, dependable, modern alternatives if you don't want to deal with the hardware, and also don't need "scale on demand"? The only name I know is SoftLayer, which is certainly not cheap.

idlewords 11y ago
Hetzner.de is a good place to rent a dedicated machine that is fairly configurable.
- lobster_johnson 11y ago
  I know Hetzner, but I didn't think they had any datacenters in the US.
  - idlewords 11y ago
    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.
    - lobster_johnson 11y ago
      Looks alright, but their server selection is a bit limited (and hard to navigate, just a big list that doesn't even filter properly). For example, if I want 128GB RAM and SSD disks, their prices suddenly go up to thousands of dollars per month because they're all some kind of beefy Dell or HP, whereas Hetzner can give me a single-processor, 6-core Xeon E5-1650 3.4GHz + 128GB RAM + 960GB SSD for $123/mo. LeaseWeb has cheaper SuperMicros, but they either max out at 32GB, or they don't have SATA disks. They're skewed very differently: With Hetzner you can't pick "less RAM, lots of CPUs" and LeaseWeb doesn't have "lots of RAM, fewer CPUs, SSDs". A vendor like this needs to offer a much wider range of specs to be worth investing one's entire infrastructure in, to be honest.
      - idlewords 11y ago