On Jan 18, 2011, at 8:29 PM, da...@lang.hm wrote: > running an application on Amazon EC2 sounds sexy, but if you consider the > cost of running an instance all month long the pricing suddenly makes colo > and rented servers seem like a great deal (especially if you factor in > performance, take a look at the benchmarsk that phoronix did a couple of > weeks ago)
I recently interviewed with a small Austin startup that does everything on EC2, using elastic clustering & load balancing, hadoop, etc.... From what I've seen, there is no way in hell that they could run this system on co-located servers at this point, because most of their usage is transient, and the only thing that persists is the database system that is generated. Yes, the storage itself is expensive, but the ephemeral compute power to create the storage and being able to pay for just the time necessary to quickly spin up a good size hadoop cluster to load the terabytes of data and then let it go again -- that's priceless. However, in that same vein, it could be useful to discuss the pros and cons of an el-cheapo storage system like the Backblaze box, and compare and contrast that to something like a Sun X4500 "Thumper", and why in some cases it might actually make sense to pay more money for the more expensive hardware and software because it helps you greatly reduce your overall admin overhead and your people costs, thus ultimately reducing the TCO. -- Brad Knowles <b...@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
