How Amazon Followed Google Into the World of Secret Servers (2012)

http://www.wired.com/2012/11/amazon-google-secret-servers/

by ignoramous • 12 years ago

42 9 12 years ago

johansch• 12 years ago

"As University of California, Berkeley, computer science professor David Patterson points out, Amazon Web Services were remarkably cheap from the very beginning, and the prices continue to drop."

Errmm.. no?

autokad2• 12 years ago

I was thinking that myself. I have been using it since 2010, and prices since then are down by seemingly 50% and still expensive - so in the beginning, no it was not cheap. The IO is both bad and unpredictable, and even high costs instances are highly variable in performance on the same instance cost. meanwhile, their numbers are far bellow that of a hard machine you own, or get from a rackspace company.

they do save a lot of money if you do not need to hire certain types of IT fokes, and aws is extremely cost effective for satisfying the need when you have low traffic and then sudden large bursts of it that must be handled.

hellbanner• 12 years ago

What do you recommend for hosting?

jcanyc• 12 years ago

Are you talking about Elastic Block Store IO? Move away from original EBS volumes, use General Purpose SSSD (now default) or provisioned IOPS volumes.

wmf• 12 years ago

Maybe the true genius of AWS is the pricing model that makes expensive look cheap.

greggarious• 12 years ago

The beauty of AWS is that the marginal cost[1] is low.

It might cost slighly more to use an AWS instance than servers(s) than to run server(s) of similar computing power. But once you build those servers, you're stuck with them. You also need a swathe of IT staff to care for them. Thus, the marginal cost of adding computing power is quite high, since it's hard to scale back, short of selling the server or leasing out it's capacity to others.

AWS was one of the first _usable_ services that allowed people to purchase computing power on demand easily.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost

rrggrr• 12 years ago

I read this article and see a future in which Google, Amazon and Goldman are at full stop because a bulk of these machines shipped with an embedded killswitch in the NIC or motherboard. I hope a random sample is being tested with regularity.

How Amazon Followed Google Into the World of Secret Servers (2012)

Related Stories