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Depends on what you mean with 'The Cloud' and 'apps'. Hosting something 24/7 on for example Amazon's EC2 is barely cost effective. On the other hand doing regu

by st3fan 17y ago

Depends on what you mean with 'The Cloud' and 'apps'. Hosting something 24/7 on for example Amazon's EC2 is barely cost effective. On the other hand doing regular hosting combined with EC2 for peaks is extremely cost effective.

CyberFonic 17y ago
How can you tell whether the answer is "Cloud" when you don't spell out what the requirements are? In some cases cloud is a good fit for hosting an app, in other cases you are better off using virtual servers, dedicated servers or even colo. Personally, I like using GAE to prototype apps. I can put up an app and get people using it and get feedback. Then using the metrics, I spreadsheet traffic, processor loads, etc and compare the various deployment options.
moe 17y ago
Hosting something 24/7 on for example Amazon's EC2 is barely cost effective That myth keeps popping up but is simply not true in many situations. There is a wide corridor of use-cases in the mid-range where EC2 is indeed more cost effective than rented or owned servers. Sometimes dramatically so. The number of factors involved is obviously quite large, but lets just consider the baseline cost of having a "large" instance running for 3 years straight: $10386 (or as low as $4510 if you commit by reservation). You'll be hard-pressed to match that figure for a rented or bought server, simply because EC2 is a 50.000 server gig and likely yields slightly more economy-of-scale savings than your setup ever could.
- wwkeyboard 17y ago
  But to make a large instance comparable to a real server you would need to include some data transfer and persistent storage in with the price of the server. The EBS page estimates a 100 gig store for a DB would be about $26 a month. If you add to that a gigabyte of data out an hour(at $0.17) you would be up to almost 10 grand for three years of a reserved instance. $10,000 / 36 months is $277 a month, for a server.
  - moe 17y ago
    If you add bandwidth and storage to one side of the equation you'll also have to add it on the other side. Do you get the bandwidth cheaper elsewhere? Perhaps but probably not significantly. Do you get storage with similar flexibility and scalability cheaper elsewhere? Highly unlikely. Oh and housing, power and staff aren't free either. Neither are the premium support contracts with your various suppliers to get same-day replacements for failed hardware. Once you factor everything in you'll realize that EC2 is not nearly as expensive as it may seem at a glance.
- easp 17y ago
  It seems people often gloss over the issue of redundancy when making these comparisons as well. If the server hosting your EC2 instance fails, you just bring up a replacement and continue on your way. If you are on a traditional VPS, you either have to bring up a new instance from backup, or wait for the provider to get things running again, but at least they have some strong motivation to since multiple customers are down. If you have a rented or coloed server, you have to wait for someone to fix it, with shorter guaranteed turn-around times costing you more. You might be able to make the case that you could deploy an app on a single EC2 instance because in the event of failure, your downtime probably runs much less than an hour. Downtime due to a hardware problem on a rented or coloed server is likely to be much more than that. Maybe that tradeoff is acceptable to keep the costs down, but it is a tradeoff. If you aren't willing to make that tradeoff, your cheaper rented or coloed server is actually two servers, with a rough doubling in costs.

by st3fan 17y ago

CyberFonic 17y ago

How can you tell whether the answer is "Cloud" when you don't spell out what the requirements are? In some cases cloud is a good fit for hosting an app, in other cases you are better off using virtual servers, dedicated servers or even colo. Personally, I like using GAE to prototype apps. I can put up an app and get people using it and get feedback. Then using the metrics, I spreadsheet traffic, processor loads, etc and compare the various deployment options.

moe 17y ago

Hosting something 24/7 on for example Amazon's EC2 is barely cost effective That myth keeps popping up but is simply not true in many situations. There is a wide corridor of use-cases in the mid-range where EC2 is indeed more cost effective than rented or owned servers. Sometimes dramatically so. The number of factors involved is obviously quite large, but lets just consider the baseline cost of having a "large" instance running for 3 years straight: $10386 (or as low as $4510 if you commit by reservation). You'll be hard-pressed to match that figure for a rented or bought server, simply because EC2 is a 50.000 server gig and likely yields slightly more economy-of-scale savings than your setup ever could.

wwkeyboard 17y ago
But to make a large instance comparable to a real server you would need to include some data transfer and persistent storage in with the price of the server. The EBS page estimates a 100 gig store for a DB would be about $26 a month. If you add to that a gigabyte of data out an hour(at $0.17) you would be up to almost 10 grand for three years of a reserved instance. $10,000 / 36 months is $277 a month, for a server.
- moe 17y ago
  If you add bandwidth and storage to one side of the equation you'll also have to add it on the other side. Do you get the bandwidth cheaper elsewhere? Perhaps but probably not significantly. Do you get storage with similar flexibility and scalability cheaper elsewhere? Highly unlikely. Oh and housing, power and staff aren't free either. Neither are the premium support contracts with your various suppliers to get same-day replacements for failed hardware. Once you factor everything in you'll realize that EC2 is not nearly as expensive as it may seem at a glance.
easp 17y ago
It seems people often gloss over the issue of redundancy when making these comparisons as well. If the server hosting your EC2 instance fails, you just bring up a replacement and continue on your way. If you are on a traditional VPS, you either have to bring up a new instance from backup, or wait for the provider to get things running again, but at least they have some strong motivation to since multiple customers are down. If you have a rented or coloed server, you have to wait for someone to fix it, with shorter guaranteed turn-around times costing you more. You might be able to make the case that you could deploy an app on a single EC2 instance because in the event of failure, your downtime probably runs much less than an hour. Downtime due to a hardware problem on a rented or coloed server is likely to be much more than that. Maybe that tradeoff is acceptable to keep the costs down, but it is a tradeoff. If you aren't willing to make that tradeoff, your cheaper rented or coloed server is actually two servers, with a rough doubling in costs.