4 ms·

> It actually can make more sense for larger websites than for smaller ones, as Pinterest can scale with demand and thus be running 50% or less VMs during quiet

> It actually can make more sense for larger websites than for smaller ones, as Pinterest can scale with demand and thus be running 50% or less VMs during quiet periods (e.g. middle of the night). You do understand we can buy things at 33% the price AWS charges, right? And have 24/7 access? Oh, did you know you can do the same thing at other providers for cheaper? :| AWS is overpriced.

eli 11y ago
Is it not possible that the peak load is more than 3x the average load? With your own hardware you have to be provisioned for peak load 100% of the time.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  > Oh, did you know you can do the same thing at other providers for cheaper? :| https://www.stormondemand.com/servers/baremetal.html https://www.stormondemand.com/servers/baremetal.html 32/64GB - $0.75/hr https://www.linode.com/pricing https://www.linode.com/pricing 20/64GB - $.96/hr and bandwidth http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ 16/64GB - $1/hr + bandwidth costs @ [varies] Even if you take your premise at face value, AWS is literally the most expensive option. Personally, I've never seen a real world use case where you dropped below 33% capacity. In practice, you can get hourly billing for cheaper than AWS anyway with providers large enough to meet most customers needs.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    Linode, and most alternatives, don't have S3/Blob storage as a service.. also missing are distributed key-value storage as a service and sql as a service. Generally, with any given service as you can scale it makes sense to run your own instances.. but realistically someone who knows insert-tech better than AWS/Azure admins is a pretty rare breed, and having to in-source those specific skills costs in terms of time and money, redundancy even more so. If you have a team of 3-5 people, you can do far more with AWS or Azure than you can most alternatives... Employees aren't free.
tracker1 11y ago
Really? could you elaborate on these other providers? I would expect at least, VPS, remote files (S3/Azure-Blob), distributed key-value store as a service, some SQL variant as a service, and load balancing as a service. Most of the alternatives I've seen don't offer those services, and most only do VPS.

eli 11y ago

Is it not possible that the peak load is more than 3x the average load? With your own hardware you have to be provisioned for peak load 100% of the time.

fweespeech 11y ago
> Oh, did you know you can do the same thing at other providers for cheaper? :| https://www.stormondemand.com/servers/baremetal.html https://www.stormondemand.com/servers/baremetal.html 32/64GB - $0.75/hr https://www.linode.com/pricing https://www.linode.com/pricing 20/64GB - $.96/hr and bandwidth http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ 16/64GB - $1/hr + bandwidth costs @ [varies] Even if you take your premise at face value, AWS is literally the most expensive option. Personally, I've never seen a real world use case where you dropped below 33% capacity. In practice, you can get hourly billing for cheaper than AWS anyway with providers large enough to meet most customers needs.
- tracker1 11y ago
  Linode, and most alternatives, don't have S3/Blob storage as a service.. also missing are distributed key-value storage as a service and sql as a service. Generally, with any given service as you can scale it makes sense to run your own instances.. but realistically someone who knows insert-tech better than AWS/Azure admins is a pretty rare breed, and having to in-source those specific skills costs in terms of time and money, redundancy even more so. If you have a team of 3-5 people, you can do far more with AWS or Azure than you can most alternatives... Employees aren't free.

tracker1 11y ago

Really? could you elaborate on these other providers? I would expect at least, VPS, remote files (S3/Azure-Blob), distributed key-value store as a service, some SQL variant as a service, and load balancing as a service. Most of the alternatives I've seen don't offer those services, and most only do VPS.