[cstejerean]

You are looking at their on-demand rates, which means no commitment. You can do this for a month or even a few days. If you know you will need infra for 1 year or more you can use reserved rates. Right now those are not yet publicly available for Dedicated Instances, although the post mentions you can contact them if you want early access. With reserved rates the price should be 70% less for a 3 year commitment (speculating based on the post). A huge difference.

[vidarh]

But I can still for most things get lower prices on a month by month basis than the price a 3 year commitment to Amazon gets you. And that's before paying their outright extortionate bandwidth prices.

[nitrogen]

If you have to hire an extra person to manage the new hardware, then you aren't saving money.

[vidarh]

In my experience, moving people off EC2 cuts down on the ops time they need, it doesn't increase it.

For one of my clients that I manage multiple racks in two different locations for with 150+ VMs, "managing the hardware" comes out to about 1-2 days a year in aggregate to bring new hardware in and wire it up (most of that is travel) + 20-30 minutes to investigate the very few issues we can't diagnose and fix via IPMI. I pop a server in, attaches power and ethernet, checks that the IPMI is reachable and that it sees the PXE server, and beyond that "managing the hardware" comes to yanking the occasional dead harddrive and inserting a new one, and ever now and again to confirm a server is dead.

Meanwhile with EC2 I see most of the same non-hardware issues (e.g. kernel panic, applications occasionally spinning out of control and taking a server down) that are just as trivial to handle via IPMI as via the EC2 console, but we also have to engineer around things like the lack of solid, stable, directly attached RAID arrays, which we don't need to worry about with the bare metal servers.

And no, EBS does not count - the number of times volumes have gotten stuck in attached state on a failed instance terrifies me. It also can't in any way match directly attached SSD RAID setups for performance which is another reason why it ends up taking more ops time: You end up with setups that simply take more vms to compensate for platform limitations.

I absolutely think EC2 is great for things like large batch jobs etc. where your requirements vary wildly, but most people don't even have enough daily variance for that to get anywhere near compensating for the cost of EC2 (and nothing stops you from deploying hybrid approaches - in fact I'm working on hybrid approaches mixing bare metal servers with EC2 to handle batch jobs and load spikes now)

[jbverschoor]

wake up