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We just finished doing some video encoding testing on a few different platform and EC2 (along with EC2-based offerings) are considerably slower and more expensi

by jkat 14y ago

We just finished doing some video encoding testing on a few different platform and EC2 (along with EC2-based offerings) are considerably slower and more expensive. Although 10x more expensive than a 3930K, a cc2.8xlarge instance was only 1.75x faster.

chaz 14y ago
I think EC2 is almost always going to be more expensive than bare metal servers, unless you are taking advantage of the ability to pay by the hour, or leveraging flexible pricing. Reserved instances will save quite a bit of money, but spot pricing can do you even better. Check out this post from a few months ago from someone who is using spot instances for core services, and estimates 70% savings vs on demand pricing. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4662644 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4662644
davestheraves 14y ago
Where does the 10x more expensive come from? Not questioning just want to understand.
- jkat 14y ago
  We got a 3930K, 32GB ram with 2xSSDs in software Raid 1 for $169/month.
  - aioprisan 14y ago
    where from?
cjg_ 14y ago
Comparing cost of a cpu vs price of running an EC2 instance (and over what time)? Bit strange...
- dragontamer 14y ago
  How about comparing EC2 to a Virtual Private Server? Thats a bit more of an apples-to-apples comparison. Serverbear notes that Amazon 7.5GB Large instances (which cost $180+ / month) benchmark at ~650 on Unixbench... with 30 MB/s for its disk. In comparison, a 8GB VM from Digital Ocean only costs $80/month. I don't have the numbers for the 8GB VM, but the smaller $20/month 2GB instance has a UnixBench of ~1900 with over 300MB/s I/O from its solid state drive. (I presume the larger instances have more CPU power / priority in the VM scales) That is half the cost for triple the CPU performance and 10x better disk performance. Other smaller providers, such as RamNode, offer extremely fast I/O with RAID 10 Solid State Drives in their Virtual Private Servers (500+ MB/s). Amazon vs Digital Ocean serverbear.com/239-large-amazon-web-services serverbear.com/1990-2gb-ssd--2-cpu-digitalocean To be fair though, Amazon's CPUs are more consistent... consistently bad, but consistent. VPS CPUs and I/O are affected by their neighboring VMs, while Amazon seems to have removed that uncertainty. Nonetheless, in practice, you will always get a better performing CPU and I/O from other providers. And if we compare both to bare metal servers, obviously bare metal servers win in price/performance, but are harder to maintain, so its hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison. But Digital Ocean VMs can be spun up/down just like Amazon instances... although Amazon has more load balancers and other infrastructure. (But nothing is stopping you from setting HAProxy on a front-end VM to loadbalance a cluster of VMs from Digital Ocean. Even then, other VPS providers like Linode offer Load Balancers as part of their infrastructure now) Its hard for me to see the case for Amazon's cloud offerings. They don't have very much price/performance at all. At all ends of the spectrum, low end to high end, VPS providers such as Digital Ocean offers more vertical scalability as well as a cheaper price on all of Amazon's offerings. Unless you need some specialized VM from Amazon (ie: GPU compute), or are locked into their vendor-specific API (oh I feel sorry for you), there is no reason to use Amazon's services IMO.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - noelwelsh 14y ago
    In the next few months we will be migrating a number of servers to EC2. The only reason is to take advantage of latency based routing -- we really really need to reduce latency as far as possible. Anyway, there's your reason. The other reason is that big businesses just don't care. Margins are high enough on software that cost of EC2 over another provider is outweighed by the benefit of existing infrastructure, developer experience, and the risk limitation by choosing AWS.
- josteink 14y ago
  A raspberry pi is by many considering a minimum viable computer of sorts, and the bottom of what one would consider acceptable performance. Therefore seeing how Amazon compares to that is an interesting exercise. I was personally floored by how poor performance some EC2 instances has for some types of tasks (java/clojure related things among them). I quickly decided Amazon was not able to serve my needs within the price-range I was willing to pay.

by jkat 14y ago

chaz 14y ago

I think EC2 is almost always going to be more expensive than bare metal servers, unless you are taking advantage of the ability to pay by the hour, or leveraging flexible pricing. Reserved instances will save quite a bit of money, but spot pricing can do you even better. Check out this post from a few months ago from someone who is using spot instances for core services, and estimates 70% savings vs on demand pricing. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4662644 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4662644

davestheraves 14y ago

Where does the 10x more expensive come from? Not questioning just want to understand.

jkat 14y ago
We got a 3930K, 32GB ram with 2xSSDs in software Raid 1 for $169/month.
- aioprisan 14y ago
  where from?

cjg_ 14y ago

Comparing cost of a cpu vs price of running an EC2 instance (and over what time)? Bit strange...

dragontamer 14y ago
How about comparing EC2 to a Virtual Private Server? Thats a bit more of an apples-to-apples comparison. Serverbear notes that Amazon 7.5GB Large instances (which cost $180+ / month) benchmark at ~650 on Unixbench... with 30 MB/s for its disk. In comparison, a 8GB VM from Digital Ocean only costs $80/month. I don't have the numbers for the 8GB VM, but the smaller $20/month 2GB instance has a UnixBench of ~1900 with over 300MB/s I/O from its solid state drive. (I presume the larger instances have more CPU power / priority in the VM scales) That is half the cost for triple the CPU performance and 10x better disk performance. Other smaller providers, such as RamNode, offer extremely fast I/O with RAID 10 Solid State Drives in their Virtual Private Servers (500+ MB/s). Amazon vs Digital Ocean serverbear.com/239-large-amazon-web-services serverbear.com/1990-2gb-ssd--2-cpu-digitalocean To be fair though, Amazon's CPUs are more consistent... consistently bad, but consistent. VPS CPUs and I/O are affected by their neighboring VMs, while Amazon seems to have removed that uncertainty. Nonetheless, in practice, you will always get a better performing CPU and I/O from other providers. And if we compare both to bare metal servers, obviously bare metal servers win in price/performance, but are harder to maintain, so its hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison. But Digital Ocean VMs can be spun up/down just like Amazon instances... although Amazon has more load balancers and other infrastructure. (But nothing is stopping you from setting HAProxy on a front-end VM to loadbalance a cluster of VMs from Digital Ocean. Even then, other VPS providers like Linode offer Load Balancers as part of their infrastructure now) Its hard for me to see the case for Amazon's cloud offerings. They don't have very much price/performance at all. At all ends of the spectrum, low end to high end, VPS providers such as Digital Ocean offers more vertical scalability as well as a cheaper price on all of Amazon's offerings. Unless you need some specialized VM from Amazon (ie: GPU compute), or are locked into their vendor-specific API (oh I feel sorry for you), there is no reason to use Amazon's services IMO.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- noelwelsh 14y ago
  In the next few months we will be migrating a number of servers to EC2. The only reason is to take advantage of latency based routing -- we really really need to reduce latency as far as possible. Anyway, there's your reason. The other reason is that big businesses just don't care. Margins are high enough on software that cost of EC2 over another provider is outweighed by the benefit of existing infrastructure, developer experience, and the risk limitation by choosing AWS.
josteink 14y ago
A raspberry pi is by many considering a minimum viable computer of sorts, and the bottom of what one would consider acceptable performance. Therefore seeing how Amazon compares to that is an interesting exercise. I was personally floored by how poor performance some EC2 instances has for some types of tasks (java/clojure related things among them). I quickly decided Amazon was not able to serve my needs within the price-range I was willing to pay.