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by donavanm 5099 days ago
The "scalability" thing isnt about adding some ram or getting a larger proc. It's about adding a few dozen (or hundred) instances in minutes. Or getting hosts turned up in 7 different regions. Anyone can do that right now with AWS, let me know how your Equinox negotiations go for the next month.

Yes white boxes are cheap. Site negotiations, design, procurement, networking, operations, and maintenance are expensive in dollars and time. Personally I run "a bunch" of physical sites across the globe. It would be waaaay easier to be able to turn up rackspace/aws/google instances as needed.

2 comments

> The "scalability" thing isnt about adding some ram or getting a larger proc.

You'd be surprised how many people that actually use EC2 think it is.

> Yes white boxes are cheap. Site negotiations, design, procurement, networking, operations, and maintenance are expensive in dollars and time.

It's called planning ahead of time. If not, then here's a suggestion: Use EC2 until you set it up and migrate, if you cannot wait that is.

All in all I don't mind whether people use EC2 for whatever reason. Just stating my opinion. I agree of course that in terms of "convenience" is has the upper hand. Not having to wait for boxes to be added to data centers, being able to spin up boxes in multiple regions through a single company/console. Maybe your use case does justify using EC2. Many other people clearly do not (hence all the whining because of all the downtime, which they wouldn't have had if they deployed to multiple AZs/Regions).

> let me know how your Equinox negotiations go for the next month.

How do cloud services compare to a gym membership? Are you implying you can't get out of your AWS contract?

Sigh, I blame auto correct. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equinix