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I don't think you've ever calculated just how much that cost is. Lets say that you have a web service that is serving 30,000 requests per second, with a 1 Kb r

I don't think you've ever calculated just how much that cost is. Lets say that you have a web service that is serving 30,000 requests per second, with a 1 Kb request size and a 4 Kb response size and you're setting up an elastic load-balancer setup that on average keeps 300 c3.xlarge instances open. Do the math and you'll find that the cost on AWS, considering the instances used and the bandwidth, is over $80,000 per month. And that's a conservative example, since by my calculations that's about $1,000,000 per year and I know companies paying much more than that. Don't know what startups you're thinking about, but from where I'm standing, for startups that's a recipe for burning cash.

onion2k 12y ago
30,000 requests per second is 2,592,000,000 per day... That's quite a lot. Obviously we're not talking page views (because that'd be crazy successful and well beyond 'startup' territory), so we're presumably in the domain of data logging, analytics, social networking etc. Sure, AWS might not be appropriate for those. But then, the level of traffic you're talking about represents maybe 0.1% of startups. People doing "a CRUD app for a niche", which is most SaaS startups TBH, could run their software on 1 AWS medium instance for the first year or two quite happily.
- bad_user 12y ago
  You're right, we aren't talking about page views or CRUD, but it can happen in a B2B application. I ended up working for a startup like that, so this was a real anecdotal example. Our stuff was built to run on the JVM and we managed to get away with a variable number of instances between 15 and 30 (at the time we used c1.medium, which are now deprecated) - AWS's ELB is great in such a scenario as it can be configured to bring up new instances in case of traffic spikes, or kill them in case they were unused. So for us, AWS was saving us money, however that's because we were very efficient. My opinion is that if you're expecting your startup to grow soon (and I'm not talking about wishful thinking, but about requirements that have to happen for survival - i.e. you either get the desired contracts or you don't), then you have to prepare for it.

onion2k 12y ago

30,000 requests per second is 2,592,000,000 per day... That's quite a lot. Obviously we're not talking page views (because that'd be crazy successful and well beyond 'startup' territory), so we're presumably in the domain of data logging, analytics, social networking etc. Sure, AWS might not be appropriate for those. But then, the level of traffic you're talking about represents maybe 0.1% of startups. People doing "a CRUD app for a niche", which is most SaaS startups TBH, could run their software on 1 AWS medium instance for the first year or two quite happily.

bad_user 12y ago
You're right, we aren't talking about page views or CRUD, but it can happen in a B2B application. I ended up working for a startup like that, so this was a real anecdotal example. Our stuff was built to run on the JVM and we managed to get away with a variable number of instances between 15 and 30 (at the time we used c1.medium, which are now deprecated) - AWS's ELB is great in such a scenario as it can be configured to bring up new instances in case of traffic spikes, or kill them in case they were unused. So for us, AWS was saving us money, however that's because we were very efficient. My opinion is that if you're expecting your startup to grow soon (and I'm not talking about wishful thinking, but about requirements that have to happen for survival - i.e. you either get the desired contracts or you don't), then you have to prepare for it.