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I wonder if the reason that they don't offer less powerful, cheaper machines is that Google itself does not use such machines; You aren't "scaling like Google"
by clhodapp 14y ago
I wonder if the reason that they don't offer less powerful, cheaper machines is that Google itself does not use such machines; You aren't "scaling like Google" if you are not using the same types of machines as they use in their actual architecture.
Edit: You guys are right, obviously, they will almost certainly offer slower, cheaper machines at some point (even if this wasn't part of their original plan, there is a visible demand, which should motivate action). However, my real point is that I'm guessing that this initial roll-out does map more closely to what they use themselves than whatever their eventual full catalog of offerings looks like.
- wmf 14y agoYou can make VMs as small as you want.
- aliguori 14y agoBut at odd sizes, density becomes harder to achieve. Local disk I/O tends to be harder to deal with with small machines. It's a lot easier to satisfy 4 8-VCPU guests than 32 1-VCPU guests if you've only got a handful of spinning disks...
- clhodapp 14y agoNetwork bandwidth is also in this category. If they are trying to make a fixed amount of bandwidth available to each virtual instance, there is a maximum number of machines that can run behind a physical network adapter.
- wmf 14y agoI suspect cheapskates will take however little you give them in terms of I/O. I'm opposed to local disk, but that's a different discussion...
- SpikeGronim 14y agoI'm curious what you would replace local disk with. EBS? Now all the root devices in your system are dependent on a functioning network, greatly magnifying the impact of network failures. I am all for I/O optimized instances with relatively little CPU or RAM. I like having my disks local to my instances though.
- j_baker 14y agoVirtualization works wonders. You can take a big machine an divide it up into a lot of smaller machines.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoIt's all virtualized, anyway. You don't really get put on a one proc box at Amazon. More likely, the want to limit the onslaught until after they've worked out the kinks.