On 2007-06-06 15:28:36 -0000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > The back ends of some applications need a lot of compute power that > shared/virtual hosts won't let you have, so $70/month could be cheaper > than dedicated servers. (Imagine you're YouTube.) I have several > compute-intensive programs that use my TG model, but have nothing to > do with the website per se.
The real advantage of the EC2 stuff as I see it is that additional machines are available on demand and can be switched on and off through an API. So if you have an app that usually has a very small load but every once in a while experiences huge spikes and has to remain responsive during those spikes, EC2 could be a real deal. You could be running on one machine for 364 days of the year and, when the load spikes one day, it could automatically start up 100 more machines for a couple hours and then turn them off again when it's over. With the standard approach to provisioning servers, you'd have had to have all hundred machines (physical or virtual) running all the time if you couldn't predict ahead of time when the peak was coming. So imagine that a regular virtual host was $10/month. the cost would be 100 machines * $10/machine*month * 12 months = $12,000/year. Buying physical servers of course would be even more expensive. With EC2, it could be ($70/machine*month * 12 months * 1 machine) + ($2/machine*day * 100 machines * 1 day) = $1040 plus some additional storage and bandwidth charges. That's a pretty extreme example; most apps probably wouldn't have that dramatic a peak, but clearly there are situations where it does make economic sense. If your peak is more predictable (say you're a toy store and you know december will be huge) you might be able to specifically plan something out where you purchase additional virtual servers for the peak time, but EC2 lets you do it automatically; so your main server could have an app that monitors the load and starts up new instances when it goes over a certain threshold and shuts them down to save money when things quiet down again. I just wish that Amazon had some direct competition at this point. I'd be hesitant to really rely on EC2 knowing that Amazon could just decide to shut the service down at any time and there wouldn't really be anywhere to move to. -- anders pearson : http://www.columbia.edu/~anders/ C C N M T L : http://www.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/ weblog : http://thraxil.org/
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