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In 2012, I was working on a migration from EC2 to on-prem & was working on infrastructure building for zCloud. The cost factor was huge, the switch out of EC2 l
by gopalv 5y ago
In 2012, I was working on a migration from EC2 to on-prem & was working on infrastructure building for zCloud. The cost factor was huge, the switch out of EC2 literally paid for itself in a lot of ways.
The work was very interesting, because a lot of it was actually building a private cloud for internal customers & the work primarily centered around a virtualized data-center aimed at boom-bust cycles of games (15+ million users for 6 weeks, drop to 2 million for a month and down to a million in another week).
The issue is that the infrastructure cost is somewhat constant when dealing with that sort of fluctuations in revenues, so the cost to revenue ratio was unpredictable (while the cost was).
So what happened in the end looked a lot like a fire-sale of hardware when the cost was unbearable, while if it was an end-user cloud, that low-demand phase would be able to cut losses as a spot instance or something.
Anyway, a few years after I left, back to EC2 it is[1].
[1] - https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/zynga/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/zynga/
- jsnell 5y agoWhy is the infrastructure cost constant? I would have thought that for gaming, at least compute and transit would scale linearly with traffic. If games have a boom bust cycle, aren't they the perfect use case for public clouds?
- gopalv 5y agoThe infra was on-prem, so it was planned in advance and ops folks who had on-call rotations every day etc & that was rented out by the hour to the game teams (a chargeback model). The salaries and hardware cost was paid for even if the games had a bust. The period where it worked well, the games had boom-bust in somewhat controlled fashion where farmville -> cityville -> frontierville -> fishville etc, the traffic would move around rather than die down entirely. The world turned mobile-heavy and that whole pipeline fell apart while they were restructuring into mobile games (words with friends etc), when the hardware had to be sold or the payments would start to hurt.
- jsnell 5y agoAh, I think I misread your original post. I thought you were saying that the infra costs were constant on EC2 too.
- Jedd 5y agoAt around the same time I was working at a startup in London. We had two sizeable clusters - Hadoop and Cassandra - neither of which was conveniently elastic, but were located on EC2. We had sundry other instances, but those were the major culprits for our ~ £25,000 / month. It took me about a day to scope out a BOM that would well surpass that (maybe a year's expected growth) of whitebox server gear, and get some quotes from nearby co-los. IIRC hardware capex was about £15,000, and monthly rack + network something around £3,000. We relocated within a few weeks. One small bonus was predictable & consistent performance -- back then, the EU-west EC2 offerings were extremely sensitive to noisy neighbours, and our benchmarks never gave anywhere near the same results twice. I think for genuinely elastic loads, or if you're really addicted to some vendor-only services, it certainly makes sense. I suspect most customers are overly optimistic about how elastic their requirements are, and their stack can be.
- gravypod 5y agoI've had the opposite experience where others didn't see the cost savings, and also performance improvements, as a benefit. Some people get "scared" when you don't put things in the cloud. Meanwhile a last gen server with new SSDs running your applications on bare metal can outperform most EC2 instances and whatever networking cross connects at your local DC are available will get you higher bandwidth, lower latency, and more throughput for way less than AWS.