8 ms·

Amazon EC2 Beta (2006)

119 points by Jarred 10y ago

throwanem 10y ago
It'll never take off. Even if people want to use it, which seems doubtful, there's no way it can ever be economical at scale. Where's the value prop here?
- bendbro 10y ago
  Ha, were people really saying this back then?
  - quonn 10y ago
    No.
    - lovelearning 10y ago
      Because there was no HN then :)
  - jasode 10y ago
    Let's look at some August 24, 2006 posts from the peanut gallery... Here's a skeptical comment[1] from Slashdot that was scored by that community as "5:Insightful": >"Sun's grid effort has pretty much laid an egg. Perhaps I have the economics wrong, but isn't it more cost effective to build your own cluster out of discarded PCs?" As counterpoint, here's a positive comment[2] to that same announcement that was more enthusiastic about the possibilities: >Jeremy Wright • 10 years ago: Holy @#$@... We were about to move to Rackspace mainly for uptime support. If you take Jeremy Wright's research into the new economics of cloud computing and multiply it by a hundred thousand like-minded people, you can trace a direct line from that kind of post to the Rackspace sale to private equity that made the HN front page yesterday[3]. The seeds of Rackspace's sale 10 years later were sowed from the very moment of Amazon's EC2 beta announcement. [1]https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=194921&cid=15971136 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=194921&cid=15971136 [2]http://disq.us/p/16wj3u http://disq.us/p/16wj3u [3]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12365956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12365956
- hrrsn 10y ago
  I have a few qualms with this service: 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting a server setup, installing Xen, and then rolling out your own VMs that way. From Windows or Mac, these VMs could then be accessed over SSH. 2. It doesn't actually replace a dedicated server. This does not solve the connectivity issue. 3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this? (/s)
  - sixhobbits 10y ago
    In case people miss the reference, see the oft-quoted non sarcastic comment about Dropbox's launch here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- paulddraper 10y ago
  And look at the prices. No one will ever pay that much just to avoid having to drive to the data center at 2am and swap out a hard drive.
tootie 10y ago
Kids today don't remember needing a purchase order to buy hardware that had to be shipped, racked and configured. Adding scale went from 6 weeks to 6 seconds.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  The vast majority of business do not need to scale on a dime. You're paying 30-40% more to provision in 6 seconds in AWS (and let's be real, it's low 5 minutes at least for most resources like instances), but if you've got the cash to waste, go for it. As always, marketing is key.
  - derefr 10y ago
    > and let's be real, it's low 5 minutes at least for most resources like instances If you've got a pre-baked application AMI, are using EBS-backed instances, and are starting them with auto-scaling or health-checks rather than manually using the console, then no, you really can have new instances up in a couple of seconds. Mind you, the key (to getting a high ROI from AWS) isn't scaling up on a dime. It's scaling down on a dime, whenever your load decreases for even a minute or two, knowing you can just scale right back up. Being able to run with literally no paid compute-hours spent sitting around doing nothing waiting for a task can save you a rather large amount of money, usually quite easily compensating for that 30-40% AWS surcharge.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      I'd love if you could point the way then, because my pre baked AMIs that are EBS backed are always taking at least 3-5 minutes to be healthy and processing traffic or requests from the moment they're spun up. This is not restricted to a specific instance type, nor a specific region. There is literally no way you are performing compute in seconds from when an EC2 instance is instaniated. I've bookmarked this to come back to benchmark this.
    - aquark 10y ago
      > whenever your load decreases for even a minute or two, knowing you can just scale right back up. Doesn't AWS still charge by the hour ... so if you were spinning instances up and down based on minute-to-minute load you would be overpaying for vs just maintaining a steady baseline. If you turn an instance off you need to be pretty confident it will stay off for at least an hour.
mmastrac 10y ago
Fun to look through old EC2 email from back in the day (from 2007): > We have an account at that is nearing its EC2 limit - we need to be able to create more than 20 instances, preferably as many as you can give us. Our application is exploding - we're doing well over 5M page views / day and it's doubling every 2 or 3 days, so the request is rather urgent. Can you have someone call or email us right away? I remember at that time that it was just so much more expensive than physical servers at iWeb. Sure it was convenient, but the performance per dollar was something like 1/3 or 1/4. Crazy.
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  > I remember at that time that it was just so much more expensive than physical servers at iWeb. Sure it was convenient, but the performance per dollar was something like 1/3 or 1/4. Crazy. This is mostly still true.
  - beachstartup 10y ago
    there's a large number of small managed services firms doing good business pulling people out of AWS who can't actually afford it.
- danudey 10y ago
  The value in EC2 has never been in straight up cost, it's been in wild fluctuations in scale. In sites like Reddit, where your peak traffic can be 10x or 100x what your average traffic is, the ability to scale up to handle the top 5th percentile without paying a hundred times more year-round is where savings come in. Now, though, the benefit in AWS is all the add-ons that you can manage through the same system; DNS, messaging, databases, firewalls, load balancing, etc. That said, we massively overprovision our servers at my company and it's still probably less than half of what we'd pay at Amazon. That pays for my time to take care of the servers, at least.
  - merb 10y ago
    actually renting servers is cheap. however renting a stable network isn't. when you rent servers you either need a overlay network via a VPN or you end up renting a rack (1/3, half, full) and connect it yourself. but as you might guess you are now inside a single datacenter, if it burns or somehow looses it's connection you are offline. that's not a big deal for some sites, but some stuff will suffer from that. AWS and Clouds are more about networks and traffic spikes than just a bunch of servers. It's also easier to just replace the system in a outage than on most other services where you mostly try to heal it up. On Clouds you just trash it. We have some small sites on 3 AWS Small instances and a AWS RDS Master-Slave. Whenever one instance breaks or AWS makes a notice that this instance will be recycled we just reprovision it. We are also on AWS Frankfurt which didn't have a real outage yet. Google pricing would be in favor but no RDS Postgres yet, same for Azure (even when we get 130 € per month on 7 accounts for free (startup program) for 3 years or so). however our software is sold to customers as hardware and not designed to run on a cloud (yet), mostly because of sensitive data.
cperciva 10y ago
Hey Jeff, this EC2 thing sounds like exactly what I'm looking for, except that it seems to be just Linux. I'd like to get FreeBSD running on this instead... is there someone at Amazon I can talk to about making this happen? </timemachine>
blazespin 10y ago
I really feel for pmarca
- ignoramous 10y ago
  Intriguing... can you pls elaborate?
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  What's up with pmarca's website? It gives me a 404 on archive.org all the way back to 2007. I think that's the first time I've ever one do that using Wayback. Nothing but 404's.
helper 10y ago
I didn't realise that Jeff Barr has been doing these posts all the way back to 2006.
- jeffbarr 10y ago
  I started writing the AWS Blog way back in November 2004 and am coming up on 2600 posts!

119 points by Jarred 10y ago

It'll never take off. Even if people want to use it, which seems doubtful, there's no way it can ever be economical at scale. Where's the value prop here?

bendbro 10y ago
Ha, were people really saying this back then?
- quonn 10y ago
  No.
  - lovelearning 10y ago
    Because there was no HN then :)
- jasode 10y ago
  Let's look at some August 24, 2006 posts from the peanut gallery... Here's a skeptical comment[1] from Slashdot that was scored by that community as "5:Insightful": >"Sun's grid effort has pretty much laid an egg. Perhaps I have the economics wrong, but isn't it more cost effective to build your own cluster out of discarded PCs?" As counterpoint, here's a positive comment[2] to that same announcement that was more enthusiastic about the possibilities: >Jeremy Wright • 10 years ago: Holy @#$@... We were about to move to Rackspace mainly for uptime support. If you take Jeremy Wright's research into the new economics of cloud computing and multiply it by a hundred thousand like-minded people, you can trace a direct line from that kind of post to the Rackspace sale to private equity that made the HN front page yesterday[3]. The seeds of Rackspace's sale 10 years later were sowed from the very moment of Amazon's EC2 beta announcement. [1]https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=194921&cid=15971136 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=194921&cid=15971136 [2]http://disq.us/p/16wj3u http://disq.us/p/16wj3u [3]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12365956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12365956
hrrsn 10y ago
I have a few qualms with this service: 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting a server setup, installing Xen, and then rolling out your own VMs that way. From Windows or Mac, these VMs could then be accessed over SSH. 2. It doesn't actually replace a dedicated server. This does not solve the connectivity issue. 3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this? (/s)
- sixhobbits 10y ago
  In case people miss the reference, see the oft-quoted non sarcastic comment about Dropbox's launch here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
paulddraper 10y ago
And look at the prices. No one will ever pay that much just to avoid having to drive to the data center at 2am and swap out a hard drive.

tootie 10y ago

Kids today don't remember needing a purchase order to buy hardware that had to be shipped, racked and configured. Adding scale went from 6 weeks to 6 seconds.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
The vast majority of business do not need to scale on a dime. You're paying 30-40% more to provision in 6 seconds in AWS (and let's be real, it's low 5 minutes at least for most resources like instances), but if you've got the cash to waste, go for it. As always, marketing is key.
- derefr 10y ago
  > and let's be real, it's low 5 minutes at least for most resources like instances If you've got a pre-baked application AMI, are using EBS-backed instances, and are starting them with auto-scaling or health-checks rather than manually using the console, then no, you really can have new instances up in a couple of seconds. Mind you, the key (to getting a high ROI from AWS) isn't scaling up on a dime. It's scaling down on a dime, whenever your load decreases for even a minute or two, knowing you can just scale right back up. Being able to run with literally no paid compute-hours spent sitting around doing nothing waiting for a task can save you a rather large amount of money, usually quite easily compensating for that 30-40% AWS surcharge.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    I'd love if you could point the way then, because my pre baked AMIs that are EBS backed are always taking at least 3-5 minutes to be healthy and processing traffic or requests from the moment they're spun up. This is not restricted to a specific instance type, nor a specific region. There is literally no way you are performing compute in seconds from when an EC2 instance is instaniated. I've bookmarked this to come back to benchmark this.
  - aquark 10y ago
    > whenever your load decreases for even a minute or two, knowing you can just scale right back up. Doesn't AWS still charge by the hour ... so if you were spinning instances up and down based on minute-to-minute load you would be overpaying for vs just maintaining a steady baseline. If you turn an instance off you need to be pretty confident it will stay off for at least an hour.

mmastrac 10y ago

Fun to look through old EC2 email from back in the day (from 2007): > We have an account at that is nearing its EC2 limit - we need to be able to create more than 20 instances, preferably as many as you can give us. Our application is exploding - we're doing well over 5M page views / day and it's doubling every 2 or 3 days, so the request is rather urgent. Can you have someone call or email us right away? I remember at that time that it was just so much more expensive than physical servers at iWeb. Sure it was convenient, but the performance per dollar was something like 1/3 or 1/4. Crazy.

ceejayoz 10y ago
> I remember at that time that it was just so much more expensive than physical servers at iWeb. Sure it was convenient, but the performance per dollar was something like 1/3 or 1/4. Crazy. This is mostly still true.
- beachstartup 10y ago
  there's a large number of small managed services firms doing good business pulling people out of AWS who can't actually afford it.
danudey 10y ago
The value in EC2 has never been in straight up cost, it's been in wild fluctuations in scale. In sites like Reddit, where your peak traffic can be 10x or 100x what your average traffic is, the ability to scale up to handle the top 5th percentile without paying a hundred times more year-round is where savings come in. Now, though, the benefit in AWS is all the add-ons that you can manage through the same system; DNS, messaging, databases, firewalls, load balancing, etc. That said, we massively overprovision our servers at my company and it's still probably less than half of what we'd pay at Amazon. That pays for my time to take care of the servers, at least.
- merb 10y ago
  actually renting servers is cheap. however renting a stable network isn't. when you rent servers you either need a overlay network via a VPN or you end up renting a rack (1/3, half, full) and connect it yourself. but as you might guess you are now inside a single datacenter, if it burns or somehow looses it's connection you are offline. that's not a big deal for some sites, but some stuff will suffer from that. AWS and Clouds are more about networks and traffic spikes than just a bunch of servers. It's also easier to just replace the system in a outage than on most other services where you mostly try to heal it up. On Clouds you just trash it. We have some small sites on 3 AWS Small instances and a AWS RDS Master-Slave. Whenever one instance breaks or AWS makes a notice that this instance will be recycled we just reprovision it. We are also on AWS Frankfurt which didn't have a real outage yet. Google pricing would be in favor but no RDS Postgres yet, same for Azure (even when we get 130 € per month on 7 accounts for free (startup program) for 3 years or so). however our software is sold to customers as hardware and not designed to run on a cloud (yet), mostly because of sensitive data.

cperciva 10y ago

Hey Jeff, this EC2 thing sounds like exactly what I'm looking for, except that it seems to be just Linux. I'd like to get FreeBSD running on this instead... is there someone at Amazon I can talk to about making this happen? </timemachine>

blazespin 10y ago

I really feel for pmarca

ignoramous 10y ago
Intriguing... can you pls elaborate?
nickpsecurity 10y ago
What's up with pmarca's website? It gives me a 404 on archive.org all the way back to 2007. I think that's the first time I've ever one do that using Wayback. Nothing but 404's.

helper 10y ago

I didn't realise that Jeff Barr has been doing these posts all the way back to 2006.

jeffbarr 10y ago
I started writing the AWS Blog way back in November 2004 and am coming up on 2600 posts!