30 ms·

Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances

66 points by jeffbarr 16y ago

staunch 16y ago
Really exciting. By far my biggest hope for EC2 is scriptable on demand dedicated hardware. I even flirted with the idea of launching a company the did just this. The pricing seems designed to make it a feature only usable by really big customers though, which seems like a big mistake that hopefully they can do something about. Maybe by adjusting their server configs or something. Still keep getting impressed by the AWS team.
- thwarted 16y ago
  I believe Softlayer offers an API where you can script some aspects of ordering and managing machines. I haven't spent much time on it though, but I suspect it isn't scriptable in the sense that EC2 stuff is.
  - hboon 16y ago
    You can order and provision (with hardware config, OS installation/image) via their API. I just find that the time to provision is much slower than EC2 (10-20 minutes vs. 1-5 minutes).
- synack 16y ago
  We built a system for doing exactly this type of provisioning of physical hardware at Digg: http://clusto.org/ http://clusto.org/
Catalin 16y ago
10$ / hour is HUGE
- al_james 16y ago
  Not if your HUGE
- fuzzmeister 16y ago
  Amazon must be assuming that anyone seriously interested in this service spends well over $88,000/year on servers, which is likely the case.
- n_are_q 16y ago
  That's $86,700 per year, not cheap to say the least. Is that kind of setup good enough for some level of PCI compliance? I think they still require that your servers are physically secure.
  - justincormack 16y ago
    Yes Amazon has PCI compliance now, well the parts they need. The physical security is fine too, their datacentres are well secured. So this type of workload is possible.
- cpr 16y ago
  As someone else explained, that's per-region. So if you have a lot of servers in a region, that cost is amortized over all of them.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
ericz 16y ago
I don't see how this makes sense for Amazon. The $10/hr charge seems to be a flat rate no matter how many dedicated instances you have in the region. Thus I can start 10000 "small" instances and pay pennies per hour + $10/10000. Surely a small instance does not cover the cost of an entire physical machine. This seems like an economical way to DoS EC2
- bkrausz 16y ago
  They only let you launch 20 EC2 instances unless you request an increase[1]. I assume you need a damn good use case before they're up your limit to 10,000. [1] - http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/ec2-request/ http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/ec2-request/
  - justincormack 16y ago
    I think it is more of a credit check than a use case you need.
    - harryh 16y ago
      Ya, it's just this. And also a check against spam farms.
- spullara 16y ago
  The $10/hour charge is to make up for the fractional machine you are wasting. That doesn't change as you add more instances. There is always just one fractional machine being wasted.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- sorenbs 16y ago
  I think you missed this part: "launching a set of instances with dedicated tenancy does not in any way guarantee that they'll share the same hardware (they might, but you have no control over it)". In other words, when launching many small/medium instances they will make sure to stuff them onto only a few physical machines. So dedicated tenancy does not mean no virtualization - it just means that you don't share hardware with other users. So this is really just a way to accommodate whatever privacy policies that might require such thing.
qixxiq 16y ago
I understand a fractional machine being wasted, but I'm a little confused as to the pricing. $10/hour => $10 x 24 x 30 = $7200/month? I understand its useful if your running thousands of instances but I don't see the value in it as a public service. Wouldn't it be much cheaper for small clients to simply take your business elsewhere where you can get high-end servers in the $2000 range?
- bkrausz 16y ago
  The point here is customers concerned about security, like the government. It's a good call to make the public aware of the feature for when these big customers are evaluating AWS. Yes, nobody with less than 50 servers will want to even think about this, but that's not who it's targeted at. Plus, anyone who cares about security to the extent of isolating VMs physically won't care too much about the cost.
- d_r 16y ago
  This looks like a fixed cost per region, rather than a cost per instance. If so, it might actually end up being quite cost-efficient. "we add a $10/hour charge whenever you have at least one Dedicated Instance running in a Region. When figured as a per-instance cost, this charge will asymptotically approach $0 (per instance) for customers that run hundreds or thousands of instances"
- dholowiski 16y ago
  I was all excited until I saw that $10/hour charge. I guess they're targeting high end users, but it would have been nice if they had priced this within the budget of a 'normal' person. This doesn't seem to be in line with their pricing strategy for all the other AWS services.
rmoriz 16y ago
What about IPv6?
snissn 16y ago
The pricing model seems like it could be a big win for heroku, phpfog, and anyone else arbitraging EC2. Edit: My reasoning is that currently EC2 performance sucks and is reliably inconsistent, and if you can spend a fixed price to ensure that you're actually getting what you're paying for, as an ec2 arbitrator, your clients are going to be a lot more satisfied Edit 2: Ah i see, i misunderstood
- amock 16y ago
  How would this be useful to them? I don't think they care if their instances are on the same box or not. Also, how is what Heroku and PHP Fog arbitrage? They're just providing a service on top of another service; they don't even work with multiple markets.
- tlrobinson 16y ago
  I think you're misunderstanding the pricing model. AWS is charging $10 per hour on top of the regular per instance charges, because if you have a small number of instances they may have to dedicate entire machines to your small instances. As you increase the number of dedicated instances they can put more of your instances on your dedicated machines, recovering the wasted resources. Heroku and other multitenant PaaS services have no reason to use dedicated instances... customers concerned about running on multitenant platforms wouldn't even consider them in the first place.
patio11 16y ago
There are some features which read, essentially, "Check this box if you're an enterprise." This is one of them -- it addresses a very narrow slice of security concerns of the sort that people with a checklist need to address and most of us are (by implication) OK with ignoring. You should generally expect checking boxes like this to be very expensive, because anyone who checks it is not primarily motivated by money. (Similarly, Amazon isn't implementing this so they can get $10 per hour. That is absence of whee. Whee is landing the kind of client who requires this sort of thing to consider EC2 as an option. Their needs laugh in the general direction of $70k a year.) See also: compliance, auditing, etc, etc.
- jbooth 16y ago
  Some people actually need the performance guarantees, too. I've heard a lot of people whine about the unpredictable performance of I/O caused by shared tenancy, specifically people running decent sized cassandra/hbase installations or multiple database hosts. If you're willing to pay for a higher guaranteed minimum baseline, you could be in this market without a butthead ISO 9000 checklist.
  - hboon 16y ago
    But Amazon can, and still will put multiple (of your) instances onto the same box. So performance is still not as predictable as a dedicated machine.
mikiem 16y ago
It sounds to me like they are saying they really don't want to sell these Dedicated Instances.
alex1 16y ago
The biggest advantage to this (other than security) is that you won't need to share I/O or CPU time with other people, resulting in much more consistent and predictable performance across the board. Now, if only they could provide EBS this way...
- gregwebs 16y ago
  But you have to share it with yourself once you launch multiple instances, which you will if you are paying $10/hour.
zwadia 16y ago
This is for HIPAA compliance and attracting that business sector. Nobody from healthcare was going to put anything personally identifiable on shared resources, as it would violate HIPAA privacy and security rules. I don't think there are very many performance advantages here.
streeter 16y ago
My main concern with AWS is still EBS and the network latency. While this would prevent others on the same box from starving you of resources, EBS could still be affected by a neighboring box hammering the network.

66 points by jeffbarr 16y ago

Really exciting. By far my biggest hope for EC2 is scriptable on demand dedicated hardware. I even flirted with the idea of launching a company the did just this. The pricing seems designed to make it a feature only usable by really big customers though, which seems like a big mistake that hopefully they can do something about. Maybe by adjusting their server configs or something. Still keep getting impressed by the AWS team.

thwarted 16y ago
I believe Softlayer offers an API where you can script some aspects of ordering and managing machines. I haven't spent much time on it though, but I suspect it isn't scriptable in the sense that EC2 stuff is.
- hboon 16y ago
  You can order and provision (with hardware config, OS installation/image) via their API. I just find that the time to provision is much slower than EC2 (10-20 minutes vs. 1-5 minutes).
synack 16y ago
We built a system for doing exactly this type of provisioning of physical hardware at Digg: http://clusto.org/ http://clusto.org/

Catalin 16y ago

10$ / hour is HUGE

al_james 16y ago
Not if your HUGE
fuzzmeister 16y ago
Amazon must be assuming that anyone seriously interested in this service spends well over $88,000/year on servers, which is likely the case.
n_are_q 16y ago
That's $86,700 per year, not cheap to say the least. Is that kind of setup good enough for some level of PCI compliance? I think they still require that your servers are physically secure.
- justincormack 16y ago
  Yes Amazon has PCI compliance now, well the parts they need. The physical security is fine too, their datacentres are well secured. So this type of workload is possible.
cpr 16y ago
As someone else explained, that's per-region. So if you have a lot of servers in a region, that cost is amortized over all of them.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

ericz 16y ago

I don't see how this makes sense for Amazon. The $10/hr charge seems to be a flat rate no matter how many dedicated instances you have in the region. Thus I can start 10000 "small" instances and pay pennies per hour + $10/10000. Surely a small instance does not cover the cost of an entire physical machine. This seems like an economical way to DoS EC2

bkrausz 16y ago
They only let you launch 20 EC2 instances unless you request an increase[1]. I assume you need a damn good use case before they're up your limit to 10,000. [1] - http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/ec2-request/ http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/ec2-request/
- justincormack 16y ago
  I think it is more of a credit check than a use case you need.
  - harryh 16y ago
    Ya, it's just this. And also a check against spam farms.
spullara 16y ago
The $10/hour charge is to make up for the fractional machine you are wasting. That doesn't change as you add more instances. There is always just one fractional machine being wasted.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
sorenbs 16y ago
I think you missed this part: "launching a set of instances with dedicated tenancy does not in any way guarantee that they'll share the same hardware (they might, but you have no control over it)". In other words, when launching many small/medium instances they will make sure to stuff them onto only a few physical machines. So dedicated tenancy does not mean no virtualization - it just means that you don't share hardware with other users. So this is really just a way to accommodate whatever privacy policies that might require such thing.

qixxiq 16y ago

I understand a fractional machine being wasted, but I'm a little confused as to the pricing. $10/hour => $10 x 24 x 30 = $7200/month? I understand its useful if your running thousands of instances but I don't see the value in it as a public service. Wouldn't it be much cheaper for small clients to simply take your business elsewhere where you can get high-end servers in the $2000 range?

bkrausz 16y ago
The point here is customers concerned about security, like the government. It's a good call to make the public aware of the feature for when these big customers are evaluating AWS. Yes, nobody with less than 50 servers will want to even think about this, but that's not who it's targeted at. Plus, anyone who cares about security to the extent of isolating VMs physically won't care too much about the cost.
d_r 16y ago
This looks like a fixed cost per region, rather than a cost per instance. If so, it might actually end up being quite cost-efficient. "we add a $10/hour charge whenever you have at least one Dedicated Instance running in a Region. When figured as a per-instance cost, this charge will asymptotically approach $0 (per instance) for customers that run hundreds or thousands of instances"
dholowiski 16y ago
I was all excited until I saw that $10/hour charge. I guess they're targeting high end users, but it would have been nice if they had priced this within the budget of a 'normal' person. This doesn't seem to be in line with their pricing strategy for all the other AWS services.

rmoriz 16y ago

What about IPv6?

snissn 16y ago

The pricing model seems like it could be a big win for heroku, phpfog, and anyone else arbitraging EC2. Edit: My reasoning is that currently EC2 performance sucks and is reliably inconsistent, and if you can spend a fixed price to ensure that you're actually getting what you're paying for, as an ec2 arbitrator, your clients are going to be a lot more satisfied Edit 2: Ah i see, i misunderstood

amock 16y ago
How would this be useful to them? I don't think they care if their instances are on the same box or not. Also, how is what Heroku and PHP Fog arbitrage? They're just providing a service on top of another service; they don't even work with multiple markets.
tlrobinson 16y ago
I think you're misunderstanding the pricing model. AWS is charging $10 per hour on top of the regular per instance charges, because if you have a small number of instances they may have to dedicate entire machines to your small instances. As you increase the number of dedicated instances they can put more of your instances on your dedicated machines, recovering the wasted resources. Heroku and other multitenant PaaS services have no reason to use dedicated instances... customers concerned about running on multitenant platforms wouldn't even consider them in the first place.

patio11 16y ago

There are some features which read, essentially, "Check this box if you're an enterprise." This is one of them -- it addresses a very narrow slice of security concerns of the sort that people with a checklist need to address and most of us are (by implication) OK with ignoring. You should generally expect checking boxes like this to be very expensive, because anyone who checks it is not primarily motivated by money. (Similarly, Amazon isn't implementing this so they can get $10 per hour. That is absence of whee. Whee is landing the kind of client who requires this sort of thing to consider EC2 as an option. Their needs laugh in the general direction of $70k a year.) See also: compliance, auditing, etc, etc.

jbooth 16y ago
Some people actually need the performance guarantees, too. I've heard a lot of people whine about the unpredictable performance of I/O caused by shared tenancy, specifically people running decent sized cassandra/hbase installations or multiple database hosts. If you're willing to pay for a higher guaranteed minimum baseline, you could be in this market without a butthead ISO 9000 checklist.
- hboon 16y ago
  But Amazon can, and still will put multiple (of your) instances onto the same box. So performance is still not as predictable as a dedicated machine.

mikiem 16y ago

It sounds to me like they are saying they really don't want to sell these Dedicated Instances.

alex1 16y ago

The biggest advantage to this (other than security) is that you won't need to share I/O or CPU time with other people, resulting in much more consistent and predictable performance across the board. Now, if only they could provide EBS this way...

gregwebs 16y ago
But you have to share it with yourself once you launch multiple instances, which you will if you are paying $10/hour.

zwadia 16y ago

This is for HIPAA compliance and attracting that business sector. Nobody from healthcare was going to put anything personally identifiable on shared resources, as it would violate HIPAA privacy and security rules. I don't think there are very many performance advantages here.

streeter 16y ago

My main concern with AWS is still EBS and the network latency. While this would prevent others on the same box from starving you of resources, EBS could still be affected by a neighboring box hammering the network.