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If you have a more or less fixed workload then AWS ends up being a lot more expensive. If you have a highly variable workload and you have a bunch of servers s
by YZF 10y ago
If you have a more or less fixed workload then AWS ends up being a lot more expensive. If you have a highly variable workload and you have a bunch of servers sitting idle most of the time then it becomes more competitive. AWS lets a small startup go from one server to 10K servers without breaking sweat, at least in theory, but it's not for everyone. At the same time not everyone wants to build DCs with thousands of servers in different geographies all by their own.
But yeah, AWS generally is expensive, which is part of why it's making so much money.
It definitely makes business sense to try to avoid locking yourself in to AWS but at the same time it's a good place to ramp up or test your business ideas without needing to invest a lot of money in servers, real estate etc.
[You can probably substitute any other cloud provider for AWS here]
- phamilton 10y agoThe variable workload has been a little less important with reserved instances. They used to have a "light/heavy utilization" pricing structure but now it's basically cheaper to reserve the instance than it is to scale it up and down, unless you need the extra capacity less than 60% of the time.
- dexterdog 10y agoThat's going between 1 and 0 servers for an instance. Real scaling needs are met in a setup going from 3-50+ servers throughout the week.
- phamilton 10y agoI think you misunderstand me. Doing 100 servers for 16 hours and scaling down to 30 servers for 8 hours a day is more expensive than running 100 reserved instances for 24 hours a day. (100 reserved instances == average of 60 on demand instances).