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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?"
Due to my high performance AWS posting station.
Amazon Wants Your Money FTFY
Be fair, Think of all the taxes the have to pay and the living wages for staff ... oh wait
Needless, inane, editorializing in the summary, as usual. So sad. Especially when the article itself is concise, factual, and free of such nonsense.
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?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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!!!
Tat Tvam Asi
So... the "Over" was figurative?
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.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
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.
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?
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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.
Yeah, once they have enough of a monopoly to abuse it.
You know like with Hachette.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
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.