Hi, all. Something I've wanted to do for quite some time is invest in some reserved AWS instances for synhak.org to reduce our monthly bill. The problem with that is paying the high up-front cost. Since we now have this $15k grant, I'd like to use a small portion of it to build what I consider an ideal synhak.org infrastructure:
* 3 year heavy reservations for two t1.micro EC2 instances @ $200 * 1 year heavy reservation for one m1.small EC2 instance @ $169 * 3 year heavy reservation for one m1.small EC2 instance @ $257 * 3 year heavy reservation for one m1.small MySQL RDS instance @ $257.00 Total upfront cost: $883.00 Estimated monthly cost to run synhak.org: $83.52 Estimated cost without reservations: $206.62 Monthly savings: $123.10 Yearly savings: $1447.20 One year commitment: $1002.24, approximately 14% of our 2013 membership dues income. Three year commitment: $3006.72, approximately 8% of projected three year income of $36,000. Our member dues already handily cover all our other bills. Here's my sources on the AWS calculator: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html#r=IAD&key=calc-E7EBCA4F-D171-416F-AB21-D1CFE82DE07B The two micros will be used as edge webservers to host the wiki and spiff. The one year small will be a general purpose shell, phong, logging, and event processing server The three year small will be a dedicated mailing list server I'm suggesting a one year reservation to avoid getting ourselves locked into a situation of needing more horsepower for administrivia but not able to spend more than $85/mo. I don't envision our mailing list server requirements growing beyond an m1.small instance within the next three years, provided it remains dedicated to just mail. Our current AWS bill is $81.88/mo due to free tier expiring a few months ago. This investment will keep our monthly infrastructure bill roughly the same while at the same time giving us a *lot* more room to grow for that same price. For comparison, here is our current infrastructure: * Two t1.micro servers as web servers * One t1.micro server as mail host * One t1.micro MySQL RDS instance The following benefits will be realized with this $883 investment: * Faster performance on mediawiki, spiff, and other applications * Less resource contention when mailman, postfix, phong, and document rebuilding aren't all competing for the same pittance of CPU and memory * Tighter security by establishing a bastion host setup resulting in exactly two public endpoints for synhak.org * Room for growth in website activity and services offered * Significant cost reduction in critical infrastructure will be secured for three years * We would have a really cool playground for devops hackers * Current $80/mo AWS budget could be reallocated towards the maintenance budget or funneled into a monthly Hacker Grant program. I would appreciate any feedback on this idea. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://synhak.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
