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> I can't see what's wrong on Amazon's side. It's like a business telling you "if you buy four coffes you'll get one for free"; and then you complain "but I wou

by gtaylor 12y ago

> I can't see what's wrong on Amazon's side. It's like a business telling you "if you buy four coffes you'll get one for free"; and then you complain "but I would have to buy four coffees there!". To make that analogy more correct, you've got a finite amount of coffee money, and you'd be agreeing to drink the same coffee (size, flavor, quantity) for 1-3 years. If a better blend or different flavor arrived at the coffee shop, you'd be out of luck until the end of your contract. Unless you wanted to go outside of your contracted discount and pay the full rate (On Demand), while eating the sunk cost of the reservation fee. If you found your tolerance rising and wanted a bigger cup or more cups, you'd lose your discount. It's not as simple as "give me an instance and give me a discount". It's a shifting of risk from AWS to the customer.

Ensorceled 12y ago
The risk to AWS is that you'll go the fancy coffee shop down the street and leave them holding 1-3 years of bulk coffee. You are getting discount for saying "No risk, I'll stick around until the coffee runs out". There is no "shifting the risk", it's explicitly the reason for the discount.
- gtaylor 12y ago
  > There is no "shifting the risk", it's explicitly the reason for the discount. Sure there is. I'm not going to get into potential motivations and logistics (since I as a customer don't care), but there is no doubt that reservations are for shifting risk to the customer and away from Amazon. It doesn't matter if they're offering a discount, that's really not the point I am trying to make. I'm more concerned with the "risk" I take on each time I reserve an instance. The big gripe I have is that a reservation is made with the assumption that everything (quality of service, the needs of your application, customer service) stays roughly the same for the duration of the reservation. If the customer service stinks, or there are some really bad outages, I've sunk the cost and end up throwing the money away if I switch (we eat the expense instead of Amazon). If I want to upgrade my instance size and have mixed duration reservations, I've got that sunk cost to swallow. If I want to scale down, ditto. I risk throwing away money if I change plans. In a perfect world, I'd like the option to either pay an upfront reservation fee for the best rates, or run On Demand and get a graduated discount curve like Google Compute. They'd still get have an incentive to stay put, and people or companies with lower budgets could avoid the large reservation fees. At the same time, you could still pay the upfront reservation fee if you wanted the best rate and didn't mind committing for a year+.

by gtaylor 12y ago

Ensorceled 12y ago

The risk to AWS is that you'll go the fancy coffee shop down the street and leave them holding 1-3 years of bulk coffee. You are getting discount for saying "No risk, I'll stick around until the coffee runs out". There is no "shifting the risk", it's explicitly the reason for the discount.

gtaylor 12y ago
> There is no "shifting the risk", it's explicitly the reason for the discount. Sure there is. I'm not going to get into potential motivations and logistics (since I as a customer don't care), but there is no doubt that reservations are for shifting risk to the customer and away from Amazon. It doesn't matter if they're offering a discount, that's really not the point I am trying to make. I'm more concerned with the "risk" I take on each time I reserve an instance. The big gripe I have is that a reservation is made with the assumption that everything (quality of service, the needs of your application, customer service) stays roughly the same for the duration of the reservation. If the customer service stinks, or there are some really bad outages, I've sunk the cost and end up throwing the money away if I switch (we eat the expense instead of Amazon). If I want to upgrade my instance size and have mixed duration reservations, I've got that sunk cost to swallow. If I want to scale down, ditto. I risk throwing away money if I change plans. In a perfect world, I'd like the option to either pay an upfront reservation fee for the best rates, or run On Demand and get a graduated discount curve like Google Compute. They'd still get have an incentive to stay put, and people or companies with lower budgets could avoid the large reservation fees. At the same time, you could still pay the upfront reservation fee if you wanted the best rate and didn't mind committing for a year+.