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It's surprising that setting up your own servers on EC2 works out to be cheaper than using CloudFront. Is Amazon just not doing a very good job of charging thei
by JoachimSchipper 14y ago
It's surprising that setting up your own servers on EC2 works out to be cheaper than using CloudFront. Is Amazon just not doing a very good job of charging their real costs, or is HTTP/1.1 pipelining such a big win that this actually works out in EC2's favor here?
- cperciva 14y agoI don't know the details behind CloudFront, so this is just speculation, but based on the assumption that CloudFront pricing is based on the usual AWS "cost plus" computations, the per-request price looks like it's mostly covering the cost of random disk seeks. For arbitrary request streams, this is a conservative cost model and makes sense; but portsnap bits happen to be cheaper to serve up since most of the requests are for very small patch files which should never be evicted from RAM. So I don't think Amazon is doing anything wrong with their pricing, nor is this due to HTTP/1.1; it's just that the portsnap bits are "easy" to serve up in ways which are too subtle to be captured by any reasonable CDN pricing model.
- nolok 14y agoI don't know the details in the case of this particular article, but for reference we have ~60 machines on EC2, a couple dozen of TB of data on S3, we do around ~250MB/s and when picking our CDN both cdnetworks and akamai (which we ended up going with) worked out a lot cheaper than cloudfront.