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Keeping Your Cloud Costs Under Control
Tech writer David Strom offer this in-depth article on keeping your cloud costs suppressed. He writes: "Some cloud providers don’t make pricing available until you sign up for their service. Others hide pricing schedules behind complex formulae. And therein lies the challenge for an IT manager who wants to try to find the best-priced cloud: you have to read the fine print, and make sure you understand what is billable, how it is measured and priced, and when the meter starts (and stops) running. Let’s look at where you can get more precise cost information, as well as examine a few of the growing number of third-party comparison services that can help you get more control over your cloud costs."
Head on over to their monthly calculator to work out how much you'll be spending with them if you decide they are right. Would you go to do your grocery shopping and only find out how much each item you have bought is at the cashier? I think not...
I noticed that Amazon charges per hour, but I'm wondering if this is wall-clock time, or CPU-usage time? In other words, do I pay if the virtual instance is running but the CPU is idle?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
There's an oligopoly and its pricing strategy is confuseopoly? There's a first (said in intensely ironic tone of voice)
Find me an oligopoly without a confuseopoly pricing system, if you can. Cell phones? Check. Automobiles? Check. Now that almost all banks are owned by a couple big new york banks... check... Long distance providers (remember those?) ... Check...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I've been using AWS for almost a year and have been impacted by one outage so far. That's why they, you know, recommend you put things in multiple regions / availability zones, kind of just like you would before the cloud came to be.
They've had VM import for quite a while and just released VM export so you can take your EC2 instances and easily convert them into VMware images that you can download and run where ever you want.
They can certainly decide to raise their prices, but there is absolutely something stopping them from doing so: competition. In a free market you won't survive long if you are providing the same service as everyone else and charging more for it.
And as far as programmers who know what they're doing...I can see you haven't spent much time with the AWS docs or SDK. If you had, it would be obvious that they have some scary smart folks working there.
Host locally and don't give up control of your stuff.
Increase in size of Internet connection to the office.
We switched to the cloud expecting it but many IT departments dont think of the impact.
5-10 people syncing to hosted services and other onlne apps is one thing, when you have all 6900 employees doing it, it will utterly CRUSH that wimpy T3 you have.
And no, you cant use the garbage DSL or Cable modems. You need a real connection. we are buying an OC3 connection here to have upstream and downstream to be 100% reliable. and luckily we have fiber to the building already and a local POP is cheap enough that we are only spending a little more than 2X of what we were spending on the T3. We do have a business class Cable service as a failover backup.
When you scale up with "cloud" you can saturate a internet connection quite fast.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I looked at this and thought "this has SlashBi written all over it". Turns out it's actually part of SlashCloud. I must have missed the memo. When did that show up? And are we we going to get more SlashBuzzwords?
It seems like anything that is somewhat expensive, you cannot find an estimate of your final price online. You need sales people to give you a quote, then you are stuck with hearing there sales pitch and them getting annoyed when you say no.
I understand that a lot of things are variable prices... However I want to know the ball park price. Am I looking at $10,000 or $100,000 or under $5,000?
For example... The following I would like to have a ball park figure on, in my area...
1. How much for Solar Panel? How much energy will they provide... On the average for an average size home.
2. How much for Geothermal?
3. How much for Central Air Conditioning?
4. How much for enterprise software?
The problem isn't just the Companies fault, it is the customer too... Most customers are too stupid to realize there are factors, and they just don't know what an estimate means, so the companies are afraid of posting their estimated prices online because too many people think the online estimate is a quote or a contactable price. Also they will have to compete with companies who give their estimates differently, difference companies may deal with different size customers. You quote for an enterprise system, company may say a mid sized company is 100 employees an other will think it is 1000 employees. so their estimates will be orders of magnitudes off. Also there is sometimes the case you get what you pay for... Too cheap you get cheap.
While I understand the complication... I would wish there was a place where I can get an honest estimate.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I haven't spent much time with AWS docs, either. That's because I can't seem to find what answers my questions. So far this seems to NOT be a true virtual machine, or real machine for that matter. Things I'd need to know is how I can add a bunch of packages (need root access) and my applications ... and then CLONE it. Right now, we do this on real machines in a small farm. But it takes over 8 minutes to get a new box up and running. We're looking for something faster. But our cloning method is effectively installing the WHOLE operating system. If I take a vanilla Ubuntu install and apply all the additions and changes in place, it takes over 45 minutes to set it up. That's no good for a dynamic instance expansion.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
There are already employers wanting to hire people with 10 years experience managing 10000+ cloud instances.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
So they don't allow you to run rsync over ssh to make backups?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
the same lessons still apply even if you change the name to "cloud".
With an EBS backed root volume, take a snapshot, make volumes as needed and attach volume to a new instance. Or, make an AMI of the configured instance and make your instances from that new AMI.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2181849/ec2-instance-cloning
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=47881&
The revolution will be mocked
This is following a similar arc that the mainframe to PC story followed. Sadly, the people who are old enough to remember it are retiring, and the younger people who have not studies computing history are too ignorant to see it.
The "cloud" nonsense is repeating history, and will have easily predictable outcomes. We will eventually be heralding the arrival of the "new" technology that allows us to have control over our own computing (but with laws that have to be circumvented or repealed due to Government totalitarianism).
I can't help by shake my head in disbelief.
... if it has root shell access over ssh (e.g. that command line that all the New Linux geeks hate so much).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
He writes: "Some cloud providers don’t make pricing available until you sign up for their service. Others hide pricing schedules behind complex formulae
So what you're saying is by going with the "cloud" your money could end up disappearing into thin air.
OK, I'll get my coat.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Seems to me, the cloud based business model - overcharging your customers to lose their data from your server - was fine as long as they would pony up the money.(and agree to the zero liability terms)
Now that (non)economies of scale are proving too hard to keep the pictures of last summer's vacation from vanishing into the ether, it's time to reconsider allowing the end user to buy your app and worry about their own data.
For now I have dedicated and colocated servers. Each "instance" is a whole machine with full root access. In the case of the colocated ones I own them, and I have VNC/IP access to the KVM on them, with a flash drive plugged in, and can recover or reload easily.
If I can't get root access, then I can't run my custom app.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
That's what A/C was saying. With Rackspace, you do get root to your environment, and the ability to image a gold master once you've got it set up the way you want. This lets you scale sideways pretty quickly, if you need extra copies of it suddenly. Or you can take an image, spin a copy, and to an upgrade to make sure it works right. That way you're only paying for the dev / staging environments when you're using them. Things like that, which are hard to do with hardware.
Disclaimer: I work in the Rackspace Cloud Department.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
Is there a way to play with a Rackspace Cloud to see how those steps work, just as a test w/o cost (no public access)? And of course, lots of documentation.
It would be great if I could build my own environment (a root tree), and configure a kernel, and make a gold master of that. I'd base it on Slackware.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Not without cost, but a 256 MB server is only 1.5c/hr. You could spin you a standard 2 db, 2 webhead, behind a load balancer development environment to play with for just 7.5c/hr. (Don't do it with the RHEL builds, they have flat licensing fees). You can play with any of the API language bindings, or directly in curl. Our API docs are freely available to anyone, and we use a RESTful API. I wish I had seen this before, but I don't check this email often. If you're actually interested, feel free to email me at the listed email address. Make sure to put something useful in the title, so I don't discount you as spam, and I'd be more than happy to help you get started. I'm one of the stronger folks with the APIs since they interest me personally, not just professionally. Or you can check out the docs: http://docs.rackspace.com/api/ Or both.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.