Amazon Wants To Run Your High-Performance Databases

jfruh (300774) writes "Amazon is pushing hard to be as ubiquitous in the world of cloud computing as it is in bookselling. The company's latest pitch is that even your highest-performing databases will run more efficiently on Amazon Web Services cloud servers than on your own hardware. Farming out your most important and potentially sensitive computing work to one of the most opaque tech companies out there: what could possibly go wrong?"

Comments

First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

Due to my high performance AWS posting station.

FTFY

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon Wants Your Money
FTFY

Re:FTFY

[Chrisq]

Amazon Wants Your Money FTFY

Be fair, Think of all the taxes the have to pay and the living wages for staff ... oh wait

Re:FTFY

[Radak]

Of course Amazon wants your money. They're a business trying to make a profit. There are plenty of things people can complain about when it comes to Amazon or to any of their competitors in this arena, so why do people keep complaining that Amazon is trying to make a profit for itself and its shareholders?

Re:FTFY

[Anonymous Coward]

so why do people keep complaining that Amazon is trying to make a profit for itself and its shareholders?

Who is complaining? Move along these are not the complaints you are looking for.

Re:FTFY

[Radak]

Okay, maybe your post (if it was yours) wasn't a complaint, but I have seen this complaint time and again when it comes to companies like Amazon, as if we should expect big companies not to try to make a profit for their shareholders (which would be considered negligent). I think there are many more important things to be worried about (privacy being the most obvious) before people are concerned about capitalism being capitalist.

I am glad to see companies and individuals succeed, be it monetarily or otherwise, and I don't think we should let their success, or perhaps our own avarice, get in the way of asking the actually important questions about things like ethics, morals, and integrity.

Re:FTFY

[NatasRevol]

Um, actually Amazon tries not to make a profit. I'm not sure they've ever made more than 2% profit in a quarter. Typically, closer to 0%.

https://www.google.com/finance...

Re:FTFY

[Radak]

They are definitely trying to make a profit, just not in the short term. Bezos has always had a very long term outlook when it comes to profit, and apparently his shareholders are okay with that.

Re:FTFY

[NatasRevol]

Yeah, once they have enough of a monopoly to abuse it.

You know like with Hachette.

Re:FTFY

[Wycliffe]

Um, actually Amazon tries not to make a profit. I'm not sure they've ever made more than 2% profit in a quarter. Typically, closer to 0%.

https://www.google.com/finance...

That's excess profit. That's like saying you didn't make any money last year because you spent it all on a house and a boat.
Amazon is making plenty of profits. It's just spending them on expanding so it doesn't actually post profits but if you look
at it's total net worth you can see that it is still growing every year.

They also support open source properly

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon Web Services can be found on the list of Linux Foundation patrons, which means that they help to assure that open source projects get the appropriate funding that they sorely need. I don't know about you, but that's a big plus in my book.

Re:They also support open source properly

[Lennie]

The reason is, that Xen is a Linux Foundation project and Amazon AWS uses Xen:
http://www.linuxfoundation.org...

AWS is too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Get real AWS...

A m3.2xlarge costs 4905.6 per year. You can buy a 32GB RAM 8 CPU core Dell R320 system for $2,666.80 in it's entirety. Literately you are spending nearly twice as much to use AWS. And this is before even taking into account the cost Amazon charges for bandwidth.

Re: AWS is too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah u r right... 99% of aws customers need scale...? NO

Re:AWS is too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

"But who's going to fly it kid, you?"

Re:AWS is too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Get real AWS...

A m3.2xlarge costs 4905.6 per year. You can buy a 32GB RAM 8 CPU core Dell R320 system for $2,666.80 in it's entirety. Literately you are spending nearly twice as much to use AWS. And this is before even taking into account the cost Amazon charges for bandwidth.

AWS is best used in time frames of weeks, not months or years.

Try justifying a few thousand in hardware expenses for a 2-week project. Then you might see where the value lies in spinning up hardware within hours at AWS for short-term demands.

OS upgrades, backups, hardware support contracts (which aren't cheap for good response time), and of course the SysAdmin to keep it all running. Gee, I just love how you sell your Dell solution as "cheap" while omitting all of these expenses. Reminds me of Oracle sales pitches.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[TheRaven64]

If you're using AWS as a replacement for a dedicated machine, then you're doing it wrong. Even then, your comparison is disingenuous, because you're not costing in rack space, cooling, power, and so on in your purchase price.

The point of AWS is if you need to spin up a few (or a lot of) instances quickly and use them for short periods. How long does it take you to buy and rack that Dell system? If you can get it in under 2 days then your admin staff are incredibly impressive. If you can get it in a week, then they're doing pretty well. Amazon can get you the instance in a useable state in a few minutes. They can also dispose of the machine in a few minutes. That's a lot cheaper than buying those Dell instances to support your peak load, if you only ever hit that load once a year and are at 10% of that the rest of the time.

Re: AWS is too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

The solution you posted has no disaster recovery. to be fair your solution should be more than double the cost that you have put down. you still haven't taken into consideration power, air conditioning, etc,etc

Re:AWS is too expensive

[Vrtigo1]

Yes, but what if you actually want to turn it on? Then you have to pay for electricity and batteries and a generator and redundant A/C. Or if you want to connect it to the Internet reliably? Then you have to pay for multihomed Internet service. If you want it to be highly available then you have to pay for a data center to house it and probably another one for DR. If you want disk to go with it then you have to buy disk, and you have to figure out exactly how much you're going to need because if it turns out in a year or two that you need more than you thought you probably have to get another CapEx purchase approved. What if you bought too much hardware or not enough? Then you have to start over!

Not to say that AWS isn't more expensive in some respects, just highlighting the fact that other things are included in their pricing and the flexibility they provide.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[datapharmer]

1) I guess it goes down until it can be fixed under warranty (same or next day depending on purchase option). Redundancy is expensive. What happens when your single instance of AWS goes down with an "oops amazon is having problems with a datacenter" message?
2)Good job, you have identified why Netflix uses AWS.
3) Reserved instance is cheaper, but at that price still more than a dedicated server and the server typically comes with a 3 year warranty and will likely last past that (Dell will warranty for 6 years). Assuming it only lasts 3 your cost for running on AWS is nearly 3 times higher even when figuring in an improved warranty and OS licensing. I concede that short duration projects or very spiky loads are a great use for the cloud, but long running relatively even loads simply don't make sense form a cost perspective, nevermind the fact that you now lose access to your database if your wan connection goes down (unless you build out multi-wan, but there is yet another expense).

Re:AWS is too expensive

[alen]

same with AWS
the storage is extra
the networking you pay for data per MB or GB in and out
you pay for backups
you pay for DR in different availability zones
you have to pay more in your office internet access to get the faster access to access your data

all that is extra on top of that instance charge

Re: AWS is too expensive

[master_kaos]

AWS has been a blessing for our company. It is WAY cheaper and way more reliable than running something in house. We have 5 servers running that ends up being only a little more than what we were paying to run 2 servers internally (factoring in time to manage hardware, outages etc). We had way more outages running locally than we do with amazon. We do have quite a few "short" projects that is great for spinning up a server for a couple months then killing it

Re:AWS is too expensive

[hsmith]

We are using AWS for our startup. Our bills are around $2200 a month. $1700 of that is a charge to have dedicated instances instead of shared. this gets us 6 servers - 4 small 2GB RAM web servers and 2 4GB ram DB servers (in reality what we need at the moment, we can scale the DB later when we bottle neck).

We've done the math ourselves and in reality we could probably save some money (face value) or buying servers ourselves and colocating them. But, then you have to add in the maintenance costs, a part time infrastructure support person, downtime, replication, etc. Plus, things like good firewalls, load balancers, are terribly expensive which we didn't factor into the equation.

In reality, it boils down to convenience for us to stick with AWS, though it maybe a slight premium in the end. It simply cuts out a lot of costs having to deal with infrastructure.

Is AWS perfect? No, not really. Any big storm you pray to baby Jesus US-EAST stays up. But, we've been happy so far with it. I'd say all in all it isn't even a premium, factoring in all the costs it is probably break even at this point. But for us we were able to scale from $200 in server costs a month to $2000 a month easily and we can scale to $10000 a month easily. it has its value.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[master_kaos]

We just did a 3 year reserve on a few instances, it makes the cost about 1/3 the price of their on demand. Sure the cost on paper is still a bit more than dedicated for hardware alone but the chances of hardware failure, internet outages, etc has a way higher chance than AWS going out. We ran servers internally for years and switched to AWS 3 years ago, we would never go back to running internally again.
Basically I think it boils down like this - small to medium sized businesses "cloud computing" is probably more viable. When you start getting to large businesses and corporations it may be more viable to run internally.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[pnutjam]

Shhh, don't tell anyone the cloud is just an overpriced money grab. Ride the wave kid, make the cash while it's on the table.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

The storage is per GB, and per IOPS.
Normal enterprises purchase an array for $500k at the low end up to several millions at the high end, plus add on 10s or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for support, plus more for changes as real arrays are completely hands off, and cost over $10k to do even a trivial config change.

Mis-calculating the first is a rounding error, the second will break your whole department's quarterly numbers, and require your boss's boss's boss's ... boss's help to approve the fix.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[rjstanford]

1) I guess it goes down until it can be fixed under warranty (same or next day depending on purchase option). Redundancy is expensive.

With Amazon's multi-az, redundancy just costs double whatever your non-redundant primary server costs (or less). Less if you don't mind your backup server being a bit smaller. Getting true hot-spare failover working properly on a database server is a royal PITA. The fact that Amazon will happily sell it to you for $250/mo. is a steal, and far cheaper than actually doing it yourself would be for any significant project.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using AWS as a replacement for anything that requires any fucking I/O whatsoever, like a gallery of pictures of your cats, or a fucking production database, you're fucking doing it wrong.

FTFY.

Language was not optional; AWS I/O performance is that fucking terrible.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[NatasRevol]

As someone managing a farm of VMware servers where RAID6 SSDs don't have enough IO, that's good to hear.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[hawguy]

1) I guess it goes down until it can be fixed under warranty (same or next day depending on purchase option). Redundancy is expensive. What happens when your single instance of AWS goes down with an "oops amazon is having problems with a datacenter" message?

Well i guess the same thing that happens when the datacenter that my 1U server is colocated in goes down -- I either bring up the server n a DR region (which I can set up nearly for free with AWS), or wait until the datacenter problem is fixed. In the past 2 years, haven't experienced a single multi-AvailabilityZone outage with Amazon, and only 2 short single AZ outages that resulted in no loss of service since my servers are split across multiple AZ's. I've never had to fail over to the warm-spares in a separate region (other than during testing).

3) Reserved instance is cheaper, but at that price still more than a dedicated server and the server typically comes with a 3 year warranty and will likely last past that (Dell will warranty for 6 years). Assuming it only lasts 3 your cost for running on AWS is nearly 3 times higher even when figuring in an improved warranty and OS licensing. I concede that short duration projects or very spiky loads are a great use for the cloud, but long running relatively even loads simply don't make sense form a cost perspective, nevermind the fact that you now lose access to your database if your wan connection goes down (unless you build out multi-wan, but there is yet another expense).

Coloc space is not cheap, so don't forget to factor that into the costs. Running a datacenter in the office is even more expensive due to the costs to add the needed redundancy (power, cooling, internet) to an office tower.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

If you do the math, you are going to be paying for that server, CPU, RAM, OS, disks, and such, either by having the box physically located at your site, or you will be paying for a similar server in one of Amazon's racks. For ranges of weeks, AWS is fine. For constant load, might as well have the server in house and at least pay lip service to Sarbanes-Oxley or PCI-DSS3.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[HockeyPuck]

Don't feed the trolls.
Don't feed the trolls.

I used AWS for a few projects for my research. I would upload a data set to AWS run the MapReduce jobs and then analyze the output in AWS. Once complete, I'd download the results and shutdown the whole environment. I could programatically spin up the whole environment in about an hour or so.

Whole thing cost me about $350.

Re: AWS is too expensive

[Wycliffe]

We also had no problems with AWS pricing. Our problem was with their performance.
They are not set up well for high io database applications.
We switched to solid state drives on stormondemand(aka liquidweb) and have seen a 10 fold increase in performance.
I prefer liquidweb's model as I can even opt to pick the exact specs of my machine but I still have all the same
cloud features like spinning up a new instance or changing the size of an instance with a click of the button.
To me stormondemand is the best of both worlds. Oh, and the best part is that I can actually talk to someone if
there is a problem.

Re: AWS is too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

> It is WAY cheaper and way more reliable than running something in house.

No, it is not. Either you're a terrible shopper, do not do metrics, or are mischaracterizing your usage. AWS is about twice as expensive as alternatives with instability at the node and service level. They are ok for elastic needs and decent for prototyping (when you make a new account you get that free year of micros).

Re: AWS is too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

let's be real.

Racks, air conditioning, power, switches, cables, HBAs, ISP, ....

The real costs to own are higher.

Re: AWS is too expensive

[SmokeyRobot]

I am curious on using SSDs for high IO databases. Do you worry about the massive amounts of read and write on more full drives or does stormondemand balance your data so that drives are not writing over the same block enough to hit the upper limit? Increase in performance makes perfect sense but integrity of the databases is something we always debate (I work on multiple large, high IO RDBMS) whenever talk of using SSDs comes up.

Re: AWS is too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Add rent, staff, cooling, redundancy to your costs. Then add intangible costs like how much is it worth to instantly add/remove hardware.

Re: AWS is too expensive

[Wycliffe]

They are mirrored drives and we use a journalling filesystem and take good backups.
We haven't seen any issues yet. Unfortunately that's one place where cloud is lacking.
Even though stormondemand offers mirrored drives and bare metal servers, to my
knowledge there is no way for me to actually check the raid status of the server.

Re: AWS is too expensive

[SmokeyRobot]

Okay. That makes sense I figured there would be some redundancy to protect the data but I wasn't sure how easily it was managed. It sounds like it is definitely in between. Thanks for the response.

Re: AWS is too expensive

[Warphammer]

For us, I knew the game was up when the new (from a hot AWS-only company) data center director moved the goalposts for his AWS eval to 'only 20% more expensive than physical'.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[TubeSteak]

If you want it to be highly available then you have to pay for a data center to house it and probably another one for DR.

AWS US East (Virginia) keeps going down and taking parts of the internet with it.

Far too many *large* AWS customers aren't setting up any redundancy.
Vine and Instagram both got zapped in the last US East outage.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[TheSunborn]

Yes I can buy it, but then you need to include hardware installation price and hosting price.

And if the Amazon computer hosting my vm dies, the system will just boot up on a new computer and restart the vm, without me even knowing it. With the dell I would have next day business service aka far to much down time.

The reason the company I work for uses vms(Not from amazon however) is that if there are hardware problems we just reboot, and if there are to many problems with our host, all we have to do is a dns change, a scp, and a database copy(Or restore from backup) and then we can be online in a new data center.

I would however be cautious with a big database server at amazon, because I don't think their io performance is that good, and than is the thing a huge database server really need.

Re: AWS is too expensive

[ttucker]

yeah u r right... 99% of aws customers need scale...? NO

Scalability is not just for the enterprise. In AWS you can feel safe starting with a $15/month setup, knowing that you can always move to the $100/mo plan if the workload changes. When buying hardware you do not have a similar liberty. It is either buy more than you need, or risk having to buy again.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[Gothmolly]

You can also deduct the full cost of your "lease" as opposed to depreciating the hardware investment over 5 (3?) years. Because we have an outsourced, throwaway, service-based economy/society, the government makes it compelling NOT to invest in infrastructure.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[rjstanford]

If you're truly in a PCI-DSS situation, the last thing you want is to have your server in house. Now your datacenter has to be fully compliant with the PCI physical access guidelines. It'd be a lot easier to lease one somewhere like Rackspace, which is even more expensive than AWS (who provides one of the few cloud environments that's PCI level 1 certified at this point).

Re: AWS is too expensive

[toby]

A software RAID implementation like ZFS is superior to hardware RAID (it has a far higher standard of integrity and flexibility designed in), and you can monitor it however you wish. You can run it on cloud services.

Re: AWS is too expensive

[Wycliffe]

Yeah, in theory, "the cloud" is suppose to handle the failures transparently (and/or never fail) but I
find it harder to trust hardware and backups procedures that I can't physically see or test.
It would be very easy to create a virtual server which falsely claims to have full raid and geographic
redundancy, etc... but without the ability to actually test a drive failure or a datacenter failure you are
really just trusting the 3rd party to be honest and to perform due dilligence as usually their contracts
state their maximum liability is limited to just giving you your hosting fees back.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

For startups or rapidly growing organizations, Amazon can be great because it means they build everything "on the cloud" and never build out any datacenter capabilities to begin with. They could literally operate from a sofa in a cafe. But, in a steady-state operation they could probably always get a better price through some other hosting arrangement.

For organizations that already have their own legacy offices and datacenters, even with varying workload it is much less clear that Amazon is a win. The marginal cost to add another server to the datacenter or keep a server alive for another year are not always clear. At the same time, the big fixed costs continue whether they add a new server locally, rent one in the cloud, or in fact power one off forever. Also, the software-level admin overheads are not really different for local vs EC2. You can manage either type efficiently as a commodity or inefficiently as a very unique snowflake with lots of hands-on attention.

Re: AWS is too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Its very important to enable query cache (MySQL) and extra IOPS on AWS RDS

Re:AWS is too expensive

[Vrtigo1]

That's partially true...US East is actually comprised of many different availability zones, each of which is self contained and housed in a physically separate data center. So, US East isn't going down, particular AZs go down from time to time and the way Amazon names them makes it exceedingly confusing to narrow down what's actually failing. us-east-1a for me may not be the same AZ it is for you. AZs are defined on a per account basis, so it just makes it easier to say the region has issues when technically that's incorrect.

But you're spot on when you say lots of customers aren't setting up proper redundancy. AWS has made it very clear from the beginning that for proper redundancy you want resources in multiple AZs. I still don't fully trust a multi-AZ setup because although I wouldn't expect Virginia to get many hurricanes, if they did it could impact multiple AZs. I'd really like to see AWS improve support for multi-region deployments. It's an area they haven't historically been very good at. A year or so ago they finally introduced the ability to copy EBS snapshots between regions. I was one of the customers that was pounding on their door to get them to do that so they let me in on the beta testing for it.

It's a shame too because it's really pretty easy to architect for HA in AWS if you're building something there, it's not as easy if you're transplanting something though.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[Vrtigo1]

the storage is extra

You're paying for storage either way but in AWS you don't have to try to figure out the max storage you'll need. Figure you design a system with a 3-5 year lifetime, so you need to know how much storage you'll need over that period. I don't know about you, but that's pretty hard for me to do. Plus, what happens when you do a major software upgrade and you want to retain full offline backups of everything for a couple weeks, effectively doubling of tripling your storage footprint during that time? The flexibility to get as much storage as you need and only pay for it while you use it is hugely useful.

the networking you pay for data per MB or GB in and out

You rarely if ever pay for data transfer into AWS., but for transfer out you'd have the same costs if you self hosted anyway. They wouldn't be per MB, they'd be flat rate, but you're getting a lot more for your dollar at AWS. Let's say you average 10 Mbps 24x7. That's about 2.96 TB of data transfer a month which costs $346 at AWS. A symetrical 10Mbps business connection for your office is probably going to cost you more than that. In addition to that, you're also getting much better redundancy and scalability at AWS and you don't have to pay for the network equipment (switches, routers, etc).

you pay for backups

You pay for backups if you self host too.

you pay for DR in different availability zones

You might. You can create an application in an autoscaling group and tell it to span multiple AZs but only deploy one instance to the group. If that instance in AZ 1 crashes the system will automatically launch it in another AZ and you're only ever paying for 1 instance. You can also create a DR instance in another AZ and just leave it powered off until you need it, in which case you're only paying for the EBS storage, no compute costs.

you have to pay more in your office internet access to get the faster access to access your data

That's true. Many apps these days are just web apps which are not super bandwidth intensive. A lot of times if you have big data it's not as easy to make a financial case for going to the cloud. You can use direct connect to get 1Gbps or 10Gbps access directly to your data in AWS but it is fairly expensive. If you've got terabytes of data though, you probably can make up the cost in other areas.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

You also pay for storage IOPS which you don't with owning the equipment.

The fact that nobody is quoting their cloud costs here tells me that either none of you are using it, or you're not the bean-counters.

Let's get something straight, using my earlier Dell quote. I can Colo that machine at he.net for 600$/mo on 100Mbits in a full 42U, that includes power and bandwidth. To get the same out of AWS I would need to add to the 4905.6AWS machine cost:
3348$/mo for 33TB (100Mbit connection)
and about 120$/mo just to use the EBS

Trust me when I say this, anyone using AWS is out of their freaking mind unless you need it for a really short period of time (days, not months)

As for all the other ancillary costs like your staff... you are paying for staff either way, or did you just expect your AWS host to magically know when your server is down? The only costs we are looking at are the difference between cloud versus colo or your own data center.

Unless you live in a stupidly-high cost city to colo at (eg Vancouver BC, Seattle WA, New York City) and need to physically have to caress the machine every morning to make sure it's not down, the staff question isn't even a factor. You can use IPMI on any machine manufactured in the last decade unless you've been cutting corners and using consumer desktops as servers. The IPMI gives you all the KVM/PDU control you need without additional hardware.

If someone is trying to sell you the cloud snake oil, run away. When you start considering backups, AWS is an even worse contender, as you are charged for data to be sent out of your zone. Where as that is just part of your bandwidth costs if you have two separate data centers with your equipment.

Make no mistake, I don't think AWS is out there to rip people off, but when you consider the costs, they just don't work
The equipment costs, 2500$ one time versus nearly 5000$ (Yes reserved is cheaper, but that's no longer "spikey" traffic you need it for then is it?)
Bandwidth costs: 600$ vs 3300$ (And no, I don't think AWS is premium bandwidth.)
Disk IO: Free vs variable costs (assumed 120$/mo)

You need a certain level of scale, and the average person who wants to start a small business using AWS is paying enterprise prices for it. There are some really specific uses that AWS might be cost effective for (eg a business that only runs the servers from 9-5 like Wall.ST and Bankers), but data crunching doesn't keep bankers hours.

A lot of hosting providers (as in web-hosting) providers jumped on the cloud platform , eg with openstack, and they aren't competing, they are colluding to keep the prices high by simply using whatever prices AWS is publishing.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[Slashdot Parent]

1) I guess it goes down until it can be fixed under warranty (same or next day depending on purchase option). Redundancy is expensive. What happens when your single instance of AWS goes down with an "oops amazon is having problems with a datacenter" message?

If your acceptable downtime is measured in days, then yeah, you should buy your own hardware. For me, if Amazon sends me an email that my instance is running on degraded hardware, I can clone the instance and remap the IP to the new one. Total downtime is a few seconds.

Bringing up a new instance in a different AWS availability zone is always an option, or a different region if an entire region is down (rare).

Also, I do have spiky loads for the project that I'm working on and I shut down the instances when I'm not using them. I know how long my analysis is going to take, and so I launch however many instances that I need to complete the work in an hour, since AWS bills by the hour. There have been times where that's been around 150 instances. I don't have room in house for 150 machines at any price, so there is that.

Re:AWS is too expensive

[Sardaukar86]

As someone managing a farm of VMware servers where RAID6 SSDs don't have enough IO, that's good to hear.

Am I being unfair or overly unrealistic by calling VMware's IO performance "less than shitful"?

Granted, tuning is always going to be an exercise best left to the reader, however even with that in mind I've found VMware ESXi 4.0 through 5.5 to be out-of-the-box a fairly porcine experience. I'm interested to hear what I suspect may be an echo of someone with a similar opinion!

Needless editorializing

[Typical Slashdotter]

Needless, inane, editorializing in the summary, as usual. So sad. Especially when the article itself is concise, factual, and free of such nonsense.

Re:Needless editorializing

[Vitriol Angst]

So true. Takes all the fun out of everyone on slashdot saying exactly the same thing in response to the article.

The procedure is; Throw the red meat out in front of the rabid dogs -- pull hand back. You put an article out and your hands is at all still on it -- the dogs chew on you. // But all kidding aside -- YES, articles should be submitted without bias -- or with as little bias as possible. This is how we should get our news, and this is how we should start debates. It's just the reality that on Slashdot, there is a home-grown bias against "cloud" or "nano" because they are useless terms for "networked" and "small", and we distrust companies that are sneaky. So a reasonable person can predict which way the conversation is going to go.

Re:Needless editorializing

[jellomizer]

I personally find it interesting how Slashdot was so Pro-Cloud when it came out, then when RMS did some rant about it they almost all changed their minds overnight.

As with any new approach or technology, you need to look at the good and bad. The fact that there is a trade off to a different approach doesn't make it bad, it comes down to is that trade off worth the benefit.
For some people yes it is. For a lot of people the risk of not having control of your hardware is worth the value of lower upfront costs, and higher performance. For others it isn't.

At my work we don't use Cloud solutions, because our data is sensitive and there is large legal fines if it is released. Standard Cloud services are not willing to sign the contract stating that they will accept responsibility of any fines from data leeks or data loss. So we don't use them.

Other organizations the data doesn't need to be so protected, so a cloud solution works better than trying to run everything yourself.

Re:Needless editorializing

[tgv]

The article itself is nothing but a few selected quotes from Amazon's press release. You can call that factual, but I bet it hasn't even been fact-checked.

Could we can the marketing crap?

[Opportunist]

People, "cloud computing" is nothing but a rather thinly veiled mix of software as a service and server hosting, ok? The reason why we needed a new word for it is that the former had a very bad rep by now (and it fully earned that rep), and the latter is anything but edgy and cool anymore.

Could we, at least here, avoid the whole marketing lingo? It may be "cloudy" to markedroids and management, but I guess we DO know here that the data is not just put "somewhere in the cloud", right?

Re:Could we can the marketing crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Somewhere in the cloud" is as much as I need to know about the cloud services I use, that's kind of the whole point. Products don't get named for their underlying implementation they get named for their user-visible attributes. "Combination of SQL host, file server and front-end interface with best-effort backup protocols" doesn't quite have the same ring to it as "cloud computing", and it takes longer to say.

Re:Could we can the marketing crap?

[Ol Olsoc]

Could we, at least here, avoid the whole marketing lingo?

But Dude! How will we proactively leverage our infrastructure emplacement in world-centric roll-outs, and obtain niche market ubiquity? We're not going to do that with mere synergy based breakthroughs in the cloud!

Re:Could we can the marketing crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a bunch of users around the world, and you will care where the clouds are. You will care alot.

Re:Could we can the marketing crap?

[Vrtigo1]

"cloud computing" is nothing but a rather thinly veiled mix of software

I'd disagree with that pretty strongly. It can be that, but if you're using it for what it was really designed for then it's much more than that. Let's say you're a startup and you have no idea how your product is going to catch on. In the old world you'd have to buy or lease server capacity for what you anticipate your demand will be. In the cloud world, you just pay for enough to keep the system running at current demand levels, build your solution to scale horizontally, spend half a day configuring scaling policies then sit back and watch the solution take care of growing itself to meet demand.

Anyone with variations in demand can save money with the cloud. It no longer makes sense to pay to buy compute capacity to meet your maximum demand level if parts of that capacity will sit idle much of the time.

Re:Could we can the marketing crap?

[alen]

technically yes and it's working now because the market is growing

wait till growth of new customers stops and the players start to figure out ways to squeeze more profits from current customers. they over subscribe servers now, but wait a few years and see how bad it gets. and when you call support they will just blow you off and tell you it's your app that's not compatible with a hyper visor or whatever

Re:Could we can the marketing crap?

[Opportunist]

Bullshit!

Wow, you beat my ex-boss by at least 3 sentences!

Re:Could we can the marketing crap?

[Opportunist]

That still doesn't make it something that needs a fuzzy description. It STILL is a server housing service. Scaling very easily to meet demands, yes, but it still is the same old deal it was a decade ago.

What remains of it is that 9 out of 10 times whenever someone wants to put something "in the cloud" it actually means "I have no idea how to realize that". Call a spade a spade and say what you mean. Trying to be vague is not what I need when you try to describe what you WANT.

Re:Could we can the marketing crap?

[SmokeyRobot]

Can't we just create an acronym for it like in government work? CSHFEIWBEBP is totally more marketable than Cloud Computing.

Re:Could we can the marketing crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

We already had combination of sql host, file server, and front-end interface. So what makes it cloud to you ? That it's available ? That it auto-provisions ? Does it need to have redundancy ? Backups ? Does it need to be robust enough to tolerate datacenter failovers ?

Cloud promises all of this without promising it. All your services were "somewhere in the cloud" when they were "somewhere in the internet". Some still are just somewhere in the internet.

Re:Could we can the marketing crap?

[sribe]

We're not going to do that with mere synergy based breakthroughs in the cloud!

You idiot. That doesn't even make sense. Obviously, you require synergy based breakthroughs in the cloud in order to accomplish that kind of paradigm domination!

Re:Could we can the marketing crap?

[Vrtigo1]

It's definitely not the same as it was 10 years ago, not even close. 10 years ago we literally had server housing services, AWS can be that but it is also much more. Yes, part of AWS involves hosting servers, but AWS is a complete platform with its own toolset. And that's just talking about EC2. If you look at the other services there was nothing even remotely close on the market before them. Nothing like S3, RDS, Elasticache, Cloudfront etc existed in a form where it was available to everyone. Used to be you had to have a budget in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to get some of the features AWS provides today.

Even if you are talking about purely servers, AWS makes it very easy and inexpensive to accomplish a level of redundancy that would've been much more expensive in a legacy environment.

But it sounds like you're talking about two different things. If you're talking about someone saying "cloud" and having no idea what that means, then I can see your point, but it's not fair to use that logic in the same context when discussing cloud computing being used in the proper context.

Re:Could we can the marketing crap?

[Ol Olsoc]

We're not going to do that with mere synergy based breakthroughs in the cloud!

You idiot. That doesn't even make sense. Obviously, you require synergy based breakthroughs in the cloud in order to accomplish that kind of paradigm domination!

Sure, but you run the risk of adverse customer valuation index meltdown, which throws your entire supply chain into a positive feedbak loop, eventually completely wrecking the whole buy in process.

I mean, that should be your takeaway, right?

Re:Could we can the marketing crap?

[Opportunist]

Sure, but abbrev it. It's too long for anyone to remember. CSHFE would do. Pronounced as "cash fee".

AWS is too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Get real AWS...

A m3.2xlarge costs 4905.6 per year. You can buy a 32GB RAM 8 CPU core Dell R320 system for $2,666.80 in it's entirety. Literately you are spending nearly twice as much to use AWS. And this is before even taking into account the cost Amazon charges for bandwidth.

You are omitting the cost to admin, care and feed the hardware. That is AWS's selling point - what happens if you want to use it for your program / project that only lasts a short period of time? What if you got the scale wrong? Reliability and Redundancy? There is a price point for leasing services especially when there are unknowns in the scope of your venture.

hilariously old news

[Anonymous Coward]

Release: Amazon Relational Database Service
Release Date: October 22, 2009

Over my fucking dead body

[vikingpower]

And I mean "my", "fucking", "dead" and "body" literally. I already imagine telling one of my customers that I host their data on Amazon AWS. I will never have had that good an opportunity to study people's backs.

Re:Over my fucking dead body

[Thanshin]

So... the "Over" was figurative?

Re:Over my fucking dead body

[Anonymous Coward]

May you meet a horny necrophile.

Re:Over my fucking dead body

[Anonymous Coward]

How can your body be literally fucking when it's literally dead? This seems like an oxymoron, unless you're alluding to zombification of some kind. Is there porn of that?

Re:Over my fucking dead body

[K. S. Kyosuke]

How can your body be literally fucking when it's literally dead?

He's a biophile. It's a condition that gets you ostracized among dead people, but hey, we're more understanding here.

Re:Over my fucking dead body

[jratcliffe]

And I mean "my", "fucking", "dead" and "body" literally.

So, if Amazon wants your clients' business, all it needs to find is a mudering necrophile?

Re:Over my fucking dead body

[Chris Mattern]

It's a condition that gets you ostracized among dead people

Most of them won't even speak to you.

Amazon and Google...

[bayankaran]

Seems Amazon and Google see the writing on the 'internet wall'.
Their core products/services are not going to bring them anymore revenue than what they get now, and can shrink further when nimble competitors or new ideas happen. So the only way is to branch out.
Google thinks it will be driver-less cars, automation, internet balloons, thermostat etc., while Amazon thinks it will be AWS, cloud and so on.
Surprisingly both these behemoths are not branching into life sciences. May be no has made good impressive power points yet.
The one company terribly lost is Apple. They are buying into an arthritic rapper!!!

Re: Amazon and Google...

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks loke Google is branching out into life sciences:

http://mobile.theverge.com/2013/10/9/4820356/google-reportedly-investing-hundreds-of-million-into-its-new-life

Re: Amazon and Google...

[Orne]

Amazon is not going after Apple, they are going after IBM. Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are the leaders in this space, and are hitting reliability and scalability metrics that are pushing the old models out of business.

Bloomberg had a great article this month on how IBM is losing *government* contracts (its bread and butter) to AWS.

  http://mobile.businessweek.com...

Re:Amazon and Google...

[ADRA]

Companies always expand (sometimes to the neglect of their core products) because it feeds investor interest in the possibility that there's still profit growth in the company. If google stopped making cool things and still held like 85% of the ad market, the company's stock performance would in turn be tied pretty solidly with the ad market, which one would assume doesn't grow much above inflation, so not a great investment. So, companies expand into areas where they can convince the market that they're diversifying and growing their revenue centres, etc..

Re:Amazon and Google...

[tlhIngan]

Seems Amazon and Google see the writing on the 'internet wall'.
  Their core products/services are not going to bring them anymore revenue than what they get now, and can shrink further when nimble competitors or new ideas happen. So the only way is to branch out.
  Google thinks it will be driver-less cars, automation, internet balloons, thermostat etc., while Amazon thinks it will be AWS, cloud and so on.
  Surprisingly both these behemoths are not branching into life sciences. May be no has made good impressive power points yet.
  The one company terribly lost is Apple. They are buying into an arthritic rapper!!!

What makes you think Google is seeing the writing on the wall? As far as anyone's concerned, Google's investment in home automation and such are to plaster more ads in non-traditional places.

Think about it - driverless cars means you can plaster the inside and outside with ads, AND get location information of those vehicles and their users. Internet balloons - there's nothing wrong with giving more internet to more people, especially if it means more eyeballs to see ads. Home automation/thermostats - well, now there's a treasure trove of information there - and eyeball space. Knowing the house habits of people inside, being able to show ads on the thermostat, etc.

Amazon's just expanding its reach. I mean, once they get people hooked on AWS and everything, they can start to leverage them to "get a better deal" (see Hachette).

I mean, once they've got your data, you're their bitch.

Apple? They rely neither on ads nor services for revenue. They don't sell ads (well, iAds, but that pathetic thing should be put out to pasture, or taken to the back and shot. The only reasonable explanation for why it's still around is Google is paying Apple to keep up the illusion of competition). They don't really care about content, though they do note iTunes music revenue is falling as people are switching from buying to renting/streaming.

Apple knows where they're headed. It's in selling stuff to consumers, hopefully with an interface that's well thought out.

Re: Amazon and Google...

[Anonymous Coward]

See also : sequester reduces AWS usage by 20% due to loss of gov users.

Re:Amazon and Google...

[TubeSteak]

Seems Amazon and Google see the writing on the 'internet wall'.
Their core products/services are not going to bring them anymore revenue than what they get now, and can shrink further when nimble competitors or new ideas happen. So the only way is to branch out.
Google thinks it will be driver-less cars, automation, internet balloons, thermostat etc., [...]

You forget that when Google launched their IPO
they told everyone that Google would be spending money on stuff outside their core services,
that it wasn't necessarily going to be profitable, and to deal with it if you want Google stocks.

There aren't many publicly traded companies who can basically say "I do what I want and you agreed to it."
Not that it matters, since the stocks are structured so that the founders always retain voting control.

You might be right, that this is Google trying to "branch out," but it could also just be Google doing what it feels like doing and damn the costs.

Re:Amazon and Google...

[jon3k]

False Dichotomy.

Cloud is dead

[TractorBarry]

Dear America,

Following the Snowden revelations your NSA inspired dream of cloud computing and total social networking (i.e. full access too all the data in the world) is dead.

Nobody with a brain would even think of storing their data on an American computing resource.

Sincerely yours,

The rest of the world.

Re:Cloud is dead

[Virtucon]

Even though about 80% of what Snowden "leaked" is hyperbole meant to stir up shit? After listening to the interview I'm convinced that a ton of this information is utter crap. "ooh I'm a spy" "ooh I was trained by the CIA" Does the NSA have a bulk collection program? Yes. Do the US Federal Courts screw us over on privacy issues? Yes. Do the FISA courts represent a black hole in the justice system? No more than the IRS' Tax Courts but both are invalid "justice" systems meant to screw over Americans. Was any of this known before Snowden? To a large extent no, but programs like ECHELON were known to be gathering bulk intelligence for years including spying on Americans using our allies. This has been known since the 90s folks, it's nothing new! All the NSA/spy community did was extend ECHELON into the Internet realm. Cellphones and the patriot act did more to let the government in on your movements more than anything else, all in the name of "fighting terrorists."

With the progress in technology affecting our daily lives, are we that naieve to assume that the government isn't making the same kinds of leaps in tracking us when organizations like Google, Equifax, the US Postal Service even your TV with ToS like LG watching what you watch. Wake up and smell the cat shit folks, Snowden is the Inspector Clouseau of the espionage world.

What we need is a Constitutional Amendment enforcing the right to privacy in this country, also forcing an end to spying on US citizens and to secret/out of due process courts/legal systems.

Re:Cloud is dead

[Vitriol Angst]

Dear America,

Following the Snowden revelations your NSA inspired dream of cloud computing and total social networking (i.e. full access too all the data in the world) is dead.

Nobody with a brain would even think of storing their data on an American computing resource.

Sincerely yours,

The rest of the world.

Dear World,

Following the Snowden revelations your Marketing Techdroid inspired dreams of cloud computing and total social networking (i.e. full access too all the data in the world) is dead. Did you not notice the stories of how your countries / companies were complicit? If "Multinationals" in the USA rolled over, when for all intents and purposes, they own our politicians -- is it too much of a stretch to think they WANT the pervasive spying? The question to ask is; "What do multinationals get out of knowing everything about people and all the assumed secret messages that smaller companies might send to each other get out of this arrangement."

Nobody with a brain would even think of storing their data on an "Offsite" computing resource that they had no special arrangement with. And aren't their multinational corporations in YOUR country?

Sincerely yours,

Everyone with some common sense.

FTFY

While I was upset at the NSA -- I don't have delusions that other countries aren't doing the same thing. Even Sweden seemed to be happy to piggy back on the information gathering.

Re:Cloud is dead

[Vitriol Angst]

You say "hyperbole" and then go on to make a point about Google and Huffingtonpost getting all the information there is about people -- so how is it Hyperbole to assume that the NSA isn't getting at least as much as Google?

You're not defending the practice of Google or the NSA -- you're saying "Everyone is doing it so what is the big deal?"

It's not hyperbole if it is true and if you want a Constitutional Amendment -- which I don't think is necessary when we already have an Right To Privacy our Supreme Court ignores. What we need is more outrage -- not calm. What we need is different people on the Supreme Court who don't legislate for the Plutocracy and bypass Constitutional amendments and guarantees. What we need is election reform so corporations can't use money as "free speech" and take away the voice of the public.

Re:Cloud is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've seen requests for technologies that they need in the last few years, you'd see that the level of tech that Snowden and the nutjobs (and media) praising him claim the NSA/everyone else has is lightyears beyond what they even are asking for.

Re:Cloud is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Even though about 80% of what Snowden "leaked" is hyperbole meant to stir up shit? After listening to the interview I'm convinced that a ton of this information is utter crap. "ooh I'm a spy" "ooh I was trained by the CIA" Does the NSA have a bulk collection program? Yes. Do the US Federal Courts screw us over on privacy issues? Yes. Do the FISA courts represent a black hole in the justice system? No more than the IRS' Tax Courts but both are invalid "justice" systems meant to screw over Americans. Was any of this known before Snowden? To a large extent no, but programs like ECHELON were known to be gathering bulk intelligence for years including spying on Americans using our allies. This has been known since the 90s folks, it's nothing new! All the NSA/spy community did was extend ECHELON into the Internet realm...

OK, I'm just going to stop right here now.

And the next time you want to try and make a point about this being "old hat", don't make yourself look like a total fucking idiot by blowing this off like it's no big deal and didn't affect billions of people.

Re:Cloud is dead

[drinkypoo]

It's not hyperbole if it is true and if you want a Constitutional Amendment -- which I don't think is necessary when we already have an Right To Privacy our Supreme Court ignores.

Uh, wait, what? I'm sorry, can you show me where in the constitution it says you have a right to privacy? The Supremes created that right (I don't believe in natural rights, sorry) which they said the other amendments wouldn't work without, by ruling that the constitution implied it. In fact, we do not have an explicit right to privacy in the constitution. If we did, that would really help support some of the other amendments as well, and would have saved us a lot of trouble.

The Constitution was a pretty awesome document for its day, but it's showing its age. Legal documents of today are almost impenetrably obfuscated not simply to protect job security for lawyers, although there surely must be an element of that as well, but to handle the "Yes, but..." that will always arise when someone finds a law inconvenient. The constitution protects freedom, so beware of those who would limit it. They seek to do the same to your freedom.

What we need is election reform so corporations can't use money as "free speech" and take away the voice of the public.

On this, we are agreed.

Re:Cloud is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Sorry if in your search of the Constitution you skipped over the 4th amendment, but the right to privacy from government intrusion is pretty well laid out.

Re:Cloud is dead

[drinkypoo]

Sorry if in your search of the Constitution you skipped over the 4th amendment, but the right to privacy from government intrusion is pretty well laid out.

"unreasonable"

It is not unbreakable privacy. It is freedom from some government intrusion, except that which is found necessary. Which, in theory, is a decision for The People to make.

Re:Cloud is dead

[Virtucon]

The point is you're getting spied on by a lot of organizations, not just governments or their agencies. That's a fact, not hyperbole. If everybody suddenly became astonished when Snowden leaked a bunch of shit, then we have a bunch of people around the world who have been living in a fantasy world. Sure the Snowden affair has put a new light on the subject, but lets face it this shit has been going on for decades and even the EU in the 90s recognized the fact that spying on citizens was going on.

also

You're not defending the practice of Google or the NSA -- you're saying "Everyone is doing it so what is the big deal?"

No, I did not say that. I value my privacy, what's left of it that is and right now I feel that large aspects of our lives is being tracked, some under the guises of commerce or "credit reporting" but a lot of it is out of fear of terrorism or just because we have weak leaders who cower behind the mantra of "patriotism." Your privacy is being eroded daily not only by overt activities but also by inadvertent activities such as license plate/ toll tag scanning which has some validity but now with indeterminable uses for the data and no retention period policies or legislation governing it. I did indicate that the only way to solve it was with a Constitutional Amendment that would guarantee the right to privacy. You have no right to privacy under the constitution, what we have has been cobbled together by multiple court rulings. Merely passing legislation means that eventually that legislation will itself become amended, watered down and most likely abolished by subsequent congresses and administrations.

Re:Cloud is dead

[NatasRevol]

Which, in theory, is a decision for The People to make.

That's funny right there, I don't care who you are.

Re:Cloud is dead

[drinkypoo]

That's funny right there, I don't care who you are.

Comedy and tragedy are just two sides of the same coin, that's what the masks are all about. The idea of the US constitution was to create a government with powers distributed among the states and without a centralized military...

Re:Cloud is dead

[drinkypoo]

Go back to sleep, you're boring.

A quick glance over your recent posting history shows that you have nothing to contribute whatsoever. All you do is bitch and complain about what other people say. You're the opposite of B-Real in Cypress Hill. Instead of standing behind people shouting "Yeah!" you stand behind people and shout "I'm an idiot!" Well, that's what we hear, anyway.

Re:Cloud is dead

[NatasRevol]

And then the civil war happened.

Re:Cloud is dead

[drinkypoo]

And then the civil war happened.

Yes. The greedy slave-owners of the south opened the door for the greedy would-be enslavers of the north. Great. Slavery for everyone, but no moral high ground anywhere.

Re:Cloud is dead

[NatasRevol]

That's the plebe's version.

It was actually state rights vs federal rights.

Guess who won.

Re:Cloud is dead

[drinkypoo]

It was actually state rights vs federal rights.

Yes, that's what I just said. Too bad reading between the lines is considered to be a useless skill these days. Let me help you. The federal right to enslave a nation trumped the states' rights to enslave individuals. But both statists and federalists were slavers. When you have no moral high ground, then you cannot win the people. That's why the nation was divided.

Guess who won.

The wealthy landowners who run this country, the only ones with a real vote. That's why you always hear about Greece being the birthplace of democracy. They had no such thing. Only racially, sexually privileged landowners were enfranchised. You know, just like here and now. These are also the same people who won when we had the Great Depression, and the ones who are winning now that we're having an ongoing recession — and the ones who will win when it becomes a depression, and the ones who will win when we again go to war.

Re:Cloud is dead

[ADRA]

Any law that makes collection of terrestrial citizens information from external sources makes all this pretty much moot. Who says Canada, UK, hell Russia snoops on Americans and sells back Canadian,UK,Russian, etc.. citizen's data back with a swap? The US would turn a blind eye to it if it meant getting around pesky laws and such.

Re:Cloud is dead

[ADRA]

Sorry, meant to say, unless there is a law.... etc.. rinse and repeast.

Re:Cloud is dead

[phantomfive]

Nobody with a brain would even think of storing their data on an American computing resource. Sincerely yours, The rest of the world.

I think you over-estimate how much the 'rest of the world' cares about that when the cloud lets them look at pictures of their friends. When profits are to be, had companies don't care about privacy; when it gets in the way of what they want right now, consumers don't care about privacy.

Re:Cloud is dead

[Virtucon]

Any law that makes collection of terrestrial citizens information from external sources makes all this pretty much moot.

So we have extraterrestrial citizens? They should phone home.

Re:Cloud is dead

[drinkypoo]

Looking at your posting history, you obviously think what you say is important..

Looking at your moderation history, obviously no one thinks what you say is important.

you probably like the sound of your own voice as well.

Not as much as other people do. One is supposed to sound lower in one's head, I sound higher. But people tell me I have a radio voice all the time. At least they don't tell me that I have a radio face.

Re:Cloud is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at your moderation history, obviously no one thinks what you say is important.

Most likely his Slashdot karma parameter is so low that all his posts automatically begin at -1.

The mainframe is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Long live the mainframe

that would be impossible

[FudRucker]

since i write my database with a #2 pencil on paper

Re:that would be impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Amazon: you post your piece of paper to them, they scan it and sell it back to you as an ebook ... I mean high performance database. Duh.

Re:Cloud is dead except for Porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Porn,

Porn databases will be stored on AWS and the world will rejoice

Core competency??

[Anonymous Coward]

From a business perspective, one of the big drivers is to focus on core competencies. If I'm running a widget factory I should be putting my energy into making better widgets, not running databases and web servers and backup solutions. So from that perspective it makes sense to outsource IT to people who specialise in it and share the overheads across their entire customer base.

But if I'm designing widgets in direct competition with some big ass Widgets Inc. the last thing I need is the government deciding that it's in the national interest to discreetly share my new research with Widgets Inc. Worse still, the national interest might come down to Widgets Inc. are in Senator McGreedy's constituency and the President needs his support in an upcoming vote.

At least if the data is on my own server, with little or no outside access I've got some chance of grabbing market share from Widgets Inc. (or being bought out by them for $$$$).

Ruin my high-performance databases

[manu0601]

At first glance, I red "Ruin" instead of "run". I must be biased.

Well, that's great and all, but...

[wonkey_monkey]

Yes, I'm sure Amazon can run my database more efficiently than I can. But what are they going to do when I need to fetch 100 megabytes of data from a table and I want it in less than 30 seconds over my 20 megabit/s internet connection? Hmm?

Re:Well, that's great and all, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is called a thin client.

Re:Well, that's great and all, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

100 megabytes of data from a table and I want it in less than 30 seconds over my 20 megabit/s internet connection

You wait 10 more seconds:

(100 MB * 8) bits / 20 Mbits = 40 seconds

Use the 10 extra seconds for mindfulness practice.

Re:Well, that's great and all, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is called a thin client.

"Web app." "Thin Client." That's a funny way to spell dickless workstation

/older than you are :)

AWS is too expensive

[CadentOrange]

A couple of questions for you:

1) What happens when your single server goes down? How long does it take you to get back up and running?
2) What happens if your demand is spiky?

If you're going to use an instance for a year constantly, you need to look at reserved instances. That brings the price down to $3054 for the year which is not bad as you don't pay for electricity or cooling.

These things you learn when you do it.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is AWS's selling point - what happens if you want to use it for your program / project that only lasts a short period of time?

I used AWS for 3 weeks for a Data Science class. My bill was $1.92.

What if you got the scale wrong?

Buy more bandwidth processing power? You start off small and as you need more, you buy more. And if you need less, change you plan. It's nothing like buying hardware where once you buy it, you have to deal with equipment.

Reliability and Redundancy?

It'd be hell of a lot better than what I could do with Dell's in my own space.

How is this new?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody that uses external hosting for applications that use databases (I refuse to use the c-word any more) also uses it to host the databases they rely on, as it is a basic principle that you need to minimize network latency in this scenario. Having an application talk to databases thousandss of miles away running over anything but very expensive dedicated fiber would be a Very Bad Idea.

OK, Amazon probably handle the install and basic configuration for you, but how difficult is this for a DBA? In my experience, these type of externally hosted services don't reduce the amount of administration required at all, all they really save is the initial installation costs. (And that's only installation, not configuration which you still need to do plenty of yourself)

Re:How is this new?

[Collective 0-0009]

Service Provider. That's what they are. I used to call them Application Service Providers, but Microsoft swallowed that acronym.

Incorrect

[kervin]

A m3.2xlarge costs 4905.6 per year. You can buy a 32GB RAM 8 CPU core Dell R320 system for $2,666.80 in it's entirety.

If you are comparing with a fixed purchase, you should use the 3-yr reserved price for the M3.2XL, which is $162/month ( includes the initial payment ). This gives you a yearly cost of $1944. And that includes all NOC costs.

If you do not factor in NOC costs in your estimate then you clearly haven't been doing this very long.

Source http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

Re:Incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

It is also worth noting that you are buying redundant service from EC2, and Dell in your basement is not.

Re:Life sciences

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the contact lenses that measure glucose levels for diabetics and living longer efforts constitute "life sciences."

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/16/google-shows-off-smart-contact-lens-that-lets-diabetics-measure-their-glucose-levels/

https://gigaom.com/2013/09/18/googles-latest-moonshot-improving-health-and-extending-your-life/

All your data

[Anonymous Coward]

are belong to aws

Not Serious Without Performance SLAs

[schwit1]

Why use Amazon when its competitors are offering SLAs?

Re:Not Serious Without Performance SLAs

[Collective 0-0009]

The amount the SLA covers is pathetic to the actual harm downtime can cause. Even with a industry leading SLA if you are spending $10k a month and get less than 99%, you might get that full $10k back. Too bad you lost $100k (or more) thanks to that downtime. Good luck getting that additional $90k back.

So yes, it is nice that they will offer a refund for performance under a certain level, but when you expect a high, usually VERY HIGH, profit margin on this process, recouping costs is nice but far from an insurance policy. SLA = false sense of security.

But it can be a CYA for the CIO/IT Manager.

HA HA HA

[ilsaloving]

No.

As an IT Pro...

[Anonymous Coward]

with experience spanning three decades, I can reliably say I would never trust any outside entity with my database. Never have, never will. The "cloud", like so many other "new" inventions, is honestly nothing more than client/server architecture from the 60s that is now available to anyone who wishes to pay. That's obviously an oversimplification for the sake of the argument, but not far off. The "cloud" is a code word for someone else's server, which translates into "you have zero control" of your data if that "cloud" provider takes a nosedive, decides to sell your secrets, go rogue, hold your data hostage because you forgot to pay, whatever. It's not terribly difficult to manage your own data. If you think it is, you are doing it wrong. I'm not the sharpest sword on the battlefield, but I've never found it particularly onerous to manage the data in companies I've worked for, and I've worked for some large firms with data that cannot be lost or mishandled. This trend is dangerous and when the first major data loss/theft occurs, perhaps people will come to terms with reality. Cloud != better, faster, more convenient in the long run. As an IT pro, I would feel shamed at not being able to run my shop's needs in house. All of this outsourcing of data crunching and server space is really not the panacea folks think it is.

Why aren't you talking about database?

[HockeyPuck]

The R3 is just an "instance". Sure it's a memory optimized instance, but it's not even their relational instances or mapreduce databases.

I think I will keep my databases on my servers

[drakesword]

Thanks, but no thanks. I'd rather not eat into my bandwidth limits each month.

They handle LARGE loads excellently

[Anonymous Coward]

My hosting provider for my program I post about here:

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ 32/64-Bit:

http://start64.com/index.php?o...

Is served up from AMAZON for the past 1.5++ yrs. of its total 2 yrs. public online existence.

That is for GOOD reason:

Ever since I started "p.r.'ing" it on /. here, MalwareBytes' hpHosts, demand for both IT & the data it gets from them went way, Way, WAY UP... hugely!

(They're my source in the security community for hosts data, & hosting provider for my program too recommending it as "the best of its kind" @ the top of the download link above no less)

They LITERALLY HAD TO MOVE TO AMAZON - why?

Again - HUGE DEMAND (not only for my program, but for the custom hosts file data it hauls in from their servers too - that "sent them over the edge" on their ordinarly hosting provider, so off to AMAZON it's been for about 1.5++ yrs. now, only having had "issues" ONCE in that timeframe (vs. nigh constant ones before it)).

* Personally, for THOSE purposes @ least, AMAZON does one hell of a job...

APK

P.S.=> Good security vs. DDoS too: AMAZON & MICROSOFT have such POWERFUL networking infrastructure & "overload detection" bandwidth-wise they literally CAN'T BE DDoS'd... Amazon, from what I understand, built theirs up to stop DDoS during holiday shopping seasons (it works) - we only get the "side bennies" of it for website stability per the above (good move on Mr. Steven Burn's part for MalwareBytes/Hphosts to have chosen Amazon so far)...

... apk

Maybe not so clear cut

[toby]

Re Hachette: Nice background http://www.hughhowey.com/more-...

AWS Support isn't exactly chopped liver

[toby]

https://aws.amazon.com/premium...

Re:AWS Support isn't exactly chopped liver

[Wycliffe]

Some of that is new. When I last checked they only offered enterprise support. At a minimum of $15k/month that's well outside of our budget.
I'm glad to see that they are now offering cheaper plans but when you're only running a half dozen servers even the business plan is pretty expensive
and a 1 hour response time is pretty slow when other services like liquidweb and rackspace give me a faster response time and more personalized
service for free. From what I can see with both their support packages and their server performance is that AWS is designed for and works well for
companies with 50+ servers where they are load balancing and have multiple redundancies built in on every level. AWS didn't seem very reliable at
all at the single server level. We never had all our servers go down at once but when we were with AWS it was common for one server to either go
down or have degraded performance. If we had multiple servers for everything this probably wouldn't be a big deal. I hear that netflix actually
intentionally randomly turns off servers to check their redundancy but when you are running stuff on single servers without full redundancy you can't
afford to have those kind of hickups.