9 ms·

What are good use-cases for on-demand high I/O servers? At $3.10/hr, these instances work out to $2k/mo. There are probably many more cost-effective options if

by bravura 14y ago

What are good use-cases for on-demand high I/O servers? At $3.10/hr, these instances work out to $2k/mo. There are probably many more cost-effective options if you want a 2TB SSD server. Since the benefit of using EC2 is that you can provision instances elastically, what are the sorts of scenarios in which one needs to provision high I/O servers elastically? [edit: A few minutes of Googling, and I can't find any dedicated servers with 2 TB of SSD.]

saurik 14y ago
That is only one of the benefits of EC2. If you are not using elasticity, then you have to factor in the reserved instance pricing, which drops the prices down by 71% (as in, to 29% of the list price; and I mean even if you include the up-front cost: that's overall savings). You, like most people who comment on the price of EC2, do not seem to be taking this into consideration. :(
- joe_bloggs 14y ago
  What are some of the other benefits, other than elasticity or on-demand ness, and not having to spend a huge amount upfront?
  - saurik 14y ago
    One example, which stems from "on-demand ness" (which you added: I was only responding to "elasticity"), is that you can do "test runs" of migrations and deployments without even thinking about it: you can rent, for just an hour, a setup identical to your existing one, often based on a consistent and atomic snapshot of your production machine, so you can try something "likely correct but possibly horribly wrong"; then, if it works, rather than replicating the change on your "real" machine, you can just cut over to the new one and shut down the old. Way too many people seem to believe that the only benefit of "on-demand" is "elasticity", and then make bogus arguments here that "if you can plan your traffic you shouldn't be using EC2": EC2 is cheaper than people like to claim (and is in fact quite price competitive) and your ability to turn on/off machines on a whim changes the way you look at hardware so drastically that, in all honesty, it makes traditional ways of dealing with hardware seem draconian and only worth putting up with if you are dealing with some weird corner case or have horribly special requirements.
    - maayank 14y ago
      "if it works, rather than replicating the change on your "real" machine, you can just cut over to the new one and shut down the old." Interesting! Any other hacks enabled by EC2 and the like that make life much easier than real dedicated hardware?
      - cwp 14y ago
        I do this too, not for risky migrations, but for daily updates. The app relies on a data service that's normally read-only, but gets fresh data daily. When everything was running on the bare metal, we had to schedule the updates for the middle of the night and carefully migrate the data in-place to avoid interrupting service. It would take 8 to 12 hours. Since we moved to EC2, updating is simpler. The service runs on a micro instance. We launch a large instance to do all the CPU- and IO-intensive processing that prepares the new dataset, then launch a new micro instance, upload the dataset, run a few smoke tests, and if all is well, cut over to it. Because we're doing it off line, we were able to optimize the data processing for speed rather than low resource usage, and cut the runtime down to 45 minutes. One thing that's often missed in discussions of IaaS versus bare metal is that the elasticity of a particular application can be affected by its design. When we were running on dedicated machines, we smoothed out the load to avoid idle hardware, but after moving to EC2 we concentrated it into spikes to get maximum productivity from running instances. In our case, spiky load is better from a business point of view, because serving data that's 1-25 hours old is better than data that's 8-32 hours old.
    - moe 14y ago
      EC2 is cheaper than people like to claim How often do we have to repeat this argument here on HN. When running 24/7 then EC2 instances are 2-3x more expensive than the cheapest equivalent rent-server options and orders of magnitude more expensive than the physical hardware if you buy it. The numbers have been recited countless times, I'm not digging them up yet again. So, no, EC2 is not cost effective for steady loads at the mid-range. EC2 shines at the very low and the very high end and in specific workloads, i.e. it shines when the benefits can be quantified to an amount greater than the price difference.
  - jaylevitt 14y ago
    There are also the network benefits (pun intended). If the rest of your app does benefit from elasticity, you've had to choose betwen: 1. Keeping your app on EC2 and working around the lack of high I/O options 2. Keeping your app somewhere else and working around the lack of EC2-style elasticity In TFA, Netflix had chosen #1, and they used to run an extra memcached layer + I/O on 48 instances. They were able to bring this down to 15 I/O instances with no intervening cache, and lower overall latency. That said, I'd guess the on-demand hi1.xlarge won't get a lot of usage; I imagine they offer it just for orthogonality's sake (all other instances are available both on-demand and reserved), plus the ability to try before you buy. What's really exciting is that Amazon clearly recognizes their lack of good I/O solutions. Maybe we'll see a whole range of options stem out of this... one can hope.
jcdavis 14y ago
"Since the benefit of using EC2 is that you can provision instances elastically" That is certainly a benefit, but I think many would argue that its far from the only benefit. And as with all EC2 pricing, reservations drop the price substantially. A 1 lease reservation for a "heavy utilization" instance comes out to $7280 per year + $0.621 per hour for a total of $12719
- surrealize 14y ago
  > $7280 per year or $0.621 per hour. I believe that's $7280/year plus $0.621 per hour, or about a thousand dollars a month amortized over a year.
  - jcdavis 14y ago
    Good catch, thanks. Updated my original comment
jedberg 14y ago
The one that comes to mind is that you want to do a map/reduce job and need a large and fast working space to do the reductions. Otherwise, as noted below, the most likely use case is in a reserved situation running Cassandra or Postgres or something.
- cperciva 14y ago
  What sort of map-reduce space needs fast random I/O? The only things which come to mind are disguised table joins, where the right solution is to use sorting instead. (Not trying to be argumentative, I'm just trying to figure out what you have in mind.)
  - jedberg 14y ago
    It's not just random I/O that's fast, but sequential is a lot faster too. But what I'm thinking of is the tokenization of a large corpus of text into bigrams and trigrams for example.
    - bravura 14y ago
      Admittedly, it would be fun to pull in the Common Crawl and process it. Note that there's a code contest for Common Crawl that recently was announced: http://commoncrawl.org/first-ever-code-contest/ http://commoncrawl.org/first-ever-code-contest/
    - cperciva 14y ago
      Good point, with all the focus on random I/O in the announcement I was forgetting about the sequential I/O performance benefit. Hmm, that reminds me, I have an interesting toy problem which is sequential I/O limited...
tiernano 14y ago
closest i can find is Hetzner's EX8S[1] which is EUR99 for the box itself without disks, and another about EUR80 for 4 240Gb SSDs... This is a little less than HALF of what Amazon give, but costs about EUR180 a month and EUR150 for setup... but you do loose the elasticity of Amazon... Mind you, it is 1/10th of the price... [1]: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex8s http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex8s
bigiain 14y ago
I cant think of an example, but I'd guess this'd work out as a good cost-effective solution for people who need to do "big data" map-reduce type jobs, but with less utilisation than 1 week/month. Or, if you can solve the "getting the data in" problem (perhaps you've already got all your data stored on S3), you could use one of these for an hour or two at a time, perhaps running end of week or end of day batch processing, at a somewhat lower cost that having a similar sort of pay-by-the-month colo server.
XERQ 14y ago
[edit: A few minutes of Googling, and I can't find any dedicated servers with 2 TB of SSD.] I am the founder of SSD Nodes, Inc. (http://www.ssdnodes.com http://www.ssdnodes.com) and we offer lower-sized SSD-backed storage in addition to custom cloud and dedicated plans that range from 1-12TB of local SSD storage, at comparable performance. [/plug]
- corin_ 14y ago
  Given your "1-12tb" range doesn't list prices online, can you tell us whether your prices are comparable? At $1249/month for 2x 200GB SSD, it seems unlikely, but maybe I'm wrong?
  - XERQ 14y ago
    Typically clients requiring that much SSD-backed storage have performance targets and a very specific workload, so this affects options along with pricing. With that said, ballpark for what Amazon is advertising is comparable to our pricing, except with us you are _guaranteed_ the resources whereas they are using a multi-tenant environment (you're not using the only instance on their host and your I/O is influenced by everyone else using that host). EDIT: Downvoted? Please offer your point of view. EDIT2: Sample pricing offered in comment below.
    - corin_ 14y ago
      I haven't downvoted (and in fact couldn't if I wanted to since you replied to me), but personally my issue with your comment is that you're being as vague as your website's prices. Would be more interesting and relevant if you actually gave a price for a box comparable to the AWS specs.
      - XERQ 14y ago
        I apologize, here's a sample pricing configuration: 8 x 3.4GHz E3-1270 11x 200GB SLC SATA III SSD (2TB @ RAID 5) 32GB DDR3 ECC RAM 6000GB Outbound BW 2 x 1 GigE Public/Private Interfaces $2369 Monthly That's just month-to-month, if a longer term were purchased we could give a discount depending on the term.
rurounijones 14y ago
On-demand high I/O servers... Say I have a batch process that has huge I/O requirements that has to run once per month and be finished within X hours of starting or SLAs are broken. (Plenty of these types of custom workloads exist in the enterprise) I can either buy a server with specialist enterprise-grade SSD / Fusion-IO / whatever (> $20,000 most likely) for this once a month process or I can spin up one of these high I/O servers for 1 day per month for a grand total of $50. In this scenario, this new server type is a godsend.
mbreese 14y ago
I do genome mapping where our indexes won't entirely fit in memory. It would be very handy to be able to spin up a few of these instances, load the indexes from an EBS volume onto the local SSDs, then run for a couple of hours or so. This is a very I/O intensive job that we need to run about once a week, but then the rest of the time could be idle. SSDs would make our jobs run significantly faster. So much so that we've toyed with the idea of adding SSDs to our in-house cluster, but couldn't quite justify the costs. This might actually shift the cost savings to get our lab to migrate to EC2 as opposed to our in-house or university cluster.
- Gmo 14y ago
  We are also facing the same kind of problems in my company, regarding genome assembly and mapping. That's definitely something we will look into :)
- revorad 14y ago
  I'm working on a data visualisation app, which is getting a lot of interest from biologists and bioinformaticians. I'd like to learn a bit more about your work. Can I email you somewhere? Or please drop me an email at hrishi@prettygraph.com. Thanks!
- lonnyk 14y ago
  Any chance we could get an example of the data set and the calculation that needs to be done?
  - Gmo 14y ago
    Well, the raw output of a typical so-called "next gen sequencing" (which are actually very current gen) machine is around 1TB (at least, the ones we used here). This is raw file though, so once processed (but not yet analyzed) I believe we have sizes around 50 to 100GB (but that's not really what I work on so don't quote me fully on this). The next steps vary on what you want to do exactly, but it usually involves alignment of base pairs (basically, trying to tie together by their ends sequences of DNA but seeing if they "fit").
bluestix 14y ago
https://www.stormondemand.com/pricing/ https://www.stormondemand.com/pricing/ RAM: 256GB SSD: 800GB Cores: 64 Price: $1500/mon, $2.06/hr
arethuza 14y ago
Monthly financial consolidation for large companies? My employer has a rack of servers for one application that are used very heavily for a few days a month then are hardly used for the rest of the time - the databases are currently being moved to internal Fusion-IO devices rather than Fibre Channel SAN drives.
- Spooky23 14y ago
  The key consideration there is how many consulting hours will you need to figure out how to build up and tear down whatever Oracle/SAP/etc software that you need to do your financial calculations on the EC2 VM. You may find that Fusion-IO is cheaper than $50 + 3 months of consulting time.
  - arethuza 14y ago
    Well, I didn't think you'd be able to do it with existing consolidation applications! NB Honestly, I think that is a business opportunity....
yummyfajitas 14y ago
A reserved instance is about $650/month. One possible use: run your master postgres on it and use streaming replication to transmit the data to something more durable. (Don't process cc transactions this way.)
_pdeschen 14y ago
We use ec2 within our telecom infrastructure which manages peaks of several thousands of calls with full duplex call recording on (think IO here) We are using the elasticity of ec2 to scale on demand. This kind of instance is a nice addition for us as far as our auto scaling is concerned.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
earl 14y ago
on-demand doesn't matter. If lots of your infrastructure is in ec2, you may need a good db server inside ec2 that is used constantly. eg if you have a read heavy cassandra workload, you need ssds.

by bravura 14y ago

saurik 14y ago

That is only one of the benefits of EC2. If you are not using elasticity, then you have to factor in the reserved instance pricing, which drops the prices down by 71% (as in, to 29% of the list price; and I mean even if you include the up-front cost: that's overall savings). You, like most people who comment on the price of EC2, do not seem to be taking this into consideration. :(

joe_bloggs 14y ago
What are some of the other benefits, other than elasticity or on-demand ness, and not having to spend a huge amount upfront?
- saurik 14y ago
  One example, which stems from "on-demand ness" (which you added: I was only responding to "elasticity"), is that you can do "test runs" of migrations and deployments without even thinking about it: you can rent, for just an hour, a setup identical to your existing one, often based on a consistent and atomic snapshot of your production machine, so you can try something "likely correct but possibly horribly wrong"; then, if it works, rather than replicating the change on your "real" machine, you can just cut over to the new one and shut down the old. Way too many people seem to believe that the only benefit of "on-demand" is "elasticity", and then make bogus arguments here that "if you can plan your traffic you shouldn't be using EC2": EC2 is cheaper than people like to claim (and is in fact quite price competitive) and your ability to turn on/off machines on a whim changes the way you look at hardware so drastically that, in all honesty, it makes traditional ways of dealing with hardware seem draconian and only worth putting up with if you are dealing with some weird corner case or have horribly special requirements.
  - maayank 14y ago
    "if it works, rather than replicating the change on your "real" machine, you can just cut over to the new one and shut down the old." Interesting! Any other hacks enabled by EC2 and the like that make life much easier than real dedicated hardware?
    - cwp 14y ago
      I do this too, not for risky migrations, but for daily updates. The app relies on a data service that's normally read-only, but gets fresh data daily. When everything was running on the bare metal, we had to schedule the updates for the middle of the night and carefully migrate the data in-place to avoid interrupting service. It would take 8 to 12 hours. Since we moved to EC2, updating is simpler. The service runs on a micro instance. We launch a large instance to do all the CPU- and IO-intensive processing that prepares the new dataset, then launch a new micro instance, upload the dataset, run a few smoke tests, and if all is well, cut over to it. Because we're doing it off line, we were able to optimize the data processing for speed rather than low resource usage, and cut the runtime down to 45 minutes. One thing that's often missed in discussions of IaaS versus bare metal is that the elasticity of a particular application can be affected by its design. When we were running on dedicated machines, we smoothed out the load to avoid idle hardware, but after moving to EC2 we concentrated it into spikes to get maximum productivity from running instances. In our case, spiky load is better from a business point of view, because serving data that's 1-25 hours old is better than data that's 8-32 hours old.
  - moe 14y ago
    EC2 is cheaper than people like to claim How often do we have to repeat this argument here on HN. When running 24/7 then EC2 instances are 2-3x more expensive than the cheapest equivalent rent-server options and orders of magnitude more expensive than the physical hardware if you buy it. The numbers have been recited countless times, I'm not digging them up yet again. So, no, EC2 is not cost effective for steady loads at the mid-range. EC2 shines at the very low and the very high end and in specific workloads, i.e. it shines when the benefits can be quantified to an amount greater than the price difference.
- jaylevitt 14y ago
  There are also the network benefits (pun intended). If the rest of your app does benefit from elasticity, you've had to choose betwen: 1. Keeping your app on EC2 and working around the lack of high I/O options 2. Keeping your app somewhere else and working around the lack of EC2-style elasticity In TFA, Netflix had chosen #1, and they used to run an extra memcached layer + I/O on 48 instances. They were able to bring this down to 15 I/O instances with no intervening cache, and lower overall latency. That said, I'd guess the on-demand hi1.xlarge won't get a lot of usage; I imagine they offer it just for orthogonality's sake (all other instances are available both on-demand and reserved), plus the ability to try before you buy. What's really exciting is that Amazon clearly recognizes their lack of good I/O solutions. Maybe we'll see a whole range of options stem out of this... one can hope.

jcdavis 14y ago

"Since the benefit of using EC2 is that you can provision instances elastically" That is certainly a benefit, but I think many would argue that its far from the only benefit. And as with all EC2 pricing, reservations drop the price substantially. A 1 lease reservation for a "heavy utilization" instance comes out to $7280 per year + $0.621 per hour for a total of $12719

surrealize 14y ago
> $7280 per year or $0.621 per hour. I believe that's $7280/year plus $0.621 per hour, or about a thousand dollars a month amortized over a year.
- jcdavis 14y ago
  Good catch, thanks. Updated my original comment

jedberg 14y ago

The one that comes to mind is that you want to do a map/reduce job and need a large and fast working space to do the reductions. Otherwise, as noted below, the most likely use case is in a reserved situation running Cassandra or Postgres or something.

cperciva 14y ago
What sort of map-reduce space needs fast random I/O? The only things which come to mind are disguised table joins, where the right solution is to use sorting instead. (Not trying to be argumentative, I'm just trying to figure out what you have in mind.)
- jedberg 14y ago
  It's not just random I/O that's fast, but sequential is a lot faster too. But what I'm thinking of is the tokenization of a large corpus of text into bigrams and trigrams for example.
  - bravura 14y ago
    Admittedly, it would be fun to pull in the Common Crawl and process it. Note that there's a code contest for Common Crawl that recently was announced: http://commoncrawl.org/first-ever-code-contest/ http://commoncrawl.org/first-ever-code-contest/
  - cperciva 14y ago
    Good point, with all the focus on random I/O in the announcement I was forgetting about the sequential I/O performance benefit. Hmm, that reminds me, I have an interesting toy problem which is sequential I/O limited...

tiernano 14y ago

closest i can find is Hetzner's EX8S[1] which is EUR99 for the box itself without disks, and another about EUR80 for 4 240Gb SSDs... This is a little less than HALF of what Amazon give, but costs about EUR180 a month and EUR150 for setup... but you do loose the elasticity of Amazon... Mind you, it is 1/10th of the price... [1]: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex8s http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex8s

bigiain 14y ago

I cant think of an example, but I'd guess this'd work out as a good cost-effective solution for people who need to do "big data" map-reduce type jobs, but with less utilisation than 1 week/month. Or, if you can solve the "getting the data in" problem (perhaps you've already got all your data stored on S3), you could use one of these for an hour or two at a time, perhaps running end of week or end of day batch processing, at a somewhat lower cost that having a similar sort of pay-by-the-month colo server.

XERQ 14y ago

[edit: A few minutes of Googling, and I can't find any dedicated servers with 2 TB of SSD.] I am the founder of SSD Nodes, Inc. (http://www.ssdnodes.com http://www.ssdnodes.com) and we offer lower-sized SSD-backed storage in addition to custom cloud and dedicated plans that range from 1-12TB of local SSD storage, at comparable performance. [/plug]

corin_ 14y ago
Given your "1-12tb" range doesn't list prices online, can you tell us whether your prices are comparable? At $1249/month for 2x 200GB SSD, it seems unlikely, but maybe I'm wrong?
- XERQ 14y ago
  Typically clients requiring that much SSD-backed storage have performance targets and a very specific workload, so this affects options along with pricing. With that said, ballpark for what Amazon is advertising is comparable to our pricing, except with us you are _guaranteed_ the resources whereas they are using a multi-tenant environment (you're not using the only instance on their host and your I/O is influenced by everyone else using that host). EDIT: Downvoted? Please offer your point of view. EDIT2: Sample pricing offered in comment below.
  - corin_ 14y ago
    I haven't downvoted (and in fact couldn't if I wanted to since you replied to me), but personally my issue with your comment is that you're being as vague as your website's prices. Would be more interesting and relevant if you actually gave a price for a box comparable to the AWS specs.
    - XERQ 14y ago
      I apologize, here's a sample pricing configuration: 8 x 3.4GHz E3-1270 11x 200GB SLC SATA III SSD (2TB @ RAID 5) 32GB DDR3 ECC RAM 6000GB Outbound BW 2 x 1 GigE Public/Private Interfaces $2369 Monthly That's just month-to-month, if a longer term were purchased we could give a discount depending on the term.

rurounijones 14y ago

On-demand high I/O servers... Say I have a batch process that has huge I/O requirements that has to run once per month and be finished within X hours of starting or SLAs are broken. (Plenty of these types of custom workloads exist in the enterprise) I can either buy a server with specialist enterprise-grade SSD / Fusion-IO / whatever (> $20,000 most likely) for this once a month process or I can spin up one of these high I/O servers for 1 day per month for a grand total of $50. In this scenario, this new server type is a godsend.

mbreese 14y ago

I do genome mapping where our indexes won't entirely fit in memory. It would be very handy to be able to spin up a few of these instances, load the indexes from an EBS volume onto the local SSDs, then run for a couple of hours or so. This is a very I/O intensive job that we need to run about once a week, but then the rest of the time could be idle. SSDs would make our jobs run significantly faster. So much so that we've toyed with the idea of adding SSDs to our in-house cluster, but couldn't quite justify the costs. This might actually shift the cost savings to get our lab to migrate to EC2 as opposed to our in-house or university cluster.

Gmo 14y ago
We are also facing the same kind of problems in my company, regarding genome assembly and mapping. That's definitely something we will look into :)
revorad 14y ago
I'm working on a data visualisation app, which is getting a lot of interest from biologists and bioinformaticians. I'd like to learn a bit more about your work. Can I email you somewhere? Or please drop me an email at hrishi@prettygraph.com. Thanks!
lonnyk 14y ago
Any chance we could get an example of the data set and the calculation that needs to be done?
- Gmo 14y ago
  Well, the raw output of a typical so-called "next gen sequencing" (which are actually very current gen) machine is around 1TB (at least, the ones we used here). This is raw file though, so once processed (but not yet analyzed) I believe we have sizes around 50 to 100GB (but that's not really what I work on so don't quote me fully on this). The next steps vary on what you want to do exactly, but it usually involves alignment of base pairs (basically, trying to tie together by their ends sequences of DNA but seeing if they "fit").

bluestix 14y ago

https://www.stormondemand.com/pricing/ https://www.stormondemand.com/pricing/ RAM: 256GB SSD: 800GB Cores: 64 Price: $1500/mon, $2.06/hr

arethuza 14y ago

Monthly financial consolidation for large companies? My employer has a rack of servers for one application that are used very heavily for a few days a month then are hardly used for the rest of the time - the databases are currently being moved to internal Fusion-IO devices rather than Fibre Channel SAN drives.

Spooky23 14y ago
The key consideration there is how many consulting hours will you need to figure out how to build up and tear down whatever Oracle/SAP/etc software that you need to do your financial calculations on the EC2 VM. You may find that Fusion-IO is cheaper than $50 + 3 months of consulting time.
- arethuza 14y ago
  Well, I didn't think you'd be able to do it with existing consolidation applications! NB Honestly, I think that is a business opportunity....

yummyfajitas 14y ago

A reserved instance is about $650/month. One possible use: run your master postgres on it and use streaming replication to transmit the data to something more durable. (Don't process cc transactions this way.)

_pdeschen 14y ago

We use ec2 within our telecom infrastructure which manages peaks of several thousands of calls with full duplex call recording on (think IO here) We are using the elasticity of ec2 to scale on demand. This kind of instance is a nice addition for us as far as our auto scaling is concerned.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

earl 14y ago

on-demand doesn't matter. If lots of your infrastructure is in ec2, you may need a good db server inside ec2 that is used constantly. eg if you have a read heavy cassandra workload, you need ssds.