| Lets do some maths on that claim:
AWS: c3.8xlarge with 32 "CPUS" and 60 gigs of ram. For the machine alone its $1200 a month. Bear in mind its on a shared infrastructure, with noisy neighbours. You'll see about 10-30% CPU steal. In practice you'll see performance about half that of a real machine (from my comparisons) Then you'll need to factor in disks as well. First things first EBS is dogshit slow. Yes ephemeral disks are fast, but then they die, so you're in the same situation. however you need 10gig networking to get low latency, avoid puncturing the cache etc,etc,etc, for EBS the maximum IOPs you can guarantee to get is 20,000, and you need 1tb for that. for the Iops, thats $1300 a month + $125 for the 1 TB of storage. so a month, per machine it'll be $2625. $31500 per machine, per year. Every 6 months, you could buy a new machine, which is faster than the fastest EC2 instance + EBS. Now, the OP stated that they have more than one machine. Obviously one could use reserved instances. However similarly one could negotiate volume discounts. There is of course the cost of internet and cooling, you're looking at around $500 a month for half a rack, depending on power consumption. (if you're colo'ing) From a valuation point of view, having hardware counts towards your value, as its an asset you actually own. More importantly you can use it to lower your tax bill, and reduce your run rate, in exchange for an up front cost. Now, if you have a lot of bursty traffic, that doesn't require much DB activity, then AWS is perfect, as the elastic IP load balancer allows you to spin up machine on demand. However thats not that helpful for Databases. Sure you can warm migrate from a EBS snapshot, but you'd best do it quick, otherwise you'll overload an already overloaded DB. |