Cool - no problem. I’m just a wee bit curious

To be honest, I’m waiting for a specific EC2 announcement before posting it, since it changes what I’ve written (but not posted).

As soon as they announce it (and no, sorry, I can’t talk about what it is), I’ll finish up my entry.

Sorry for the delay!

AC cost?
Power cost?
Floor space?
My Time doing the installs?
Toxic waste when the new version comes out in 6 mo….

When you factor all of the costs into a computer the hardware cost is just a small part for small farms. As the Farm grows it tips the scale the other way a bit. But I would still say that run time cost is the big number, not the cost of the hardware (think lease over time of the Hardware cost at 10% cost of cash to make the numbers easy).

Your $800.00 system costs: ($800.00 * .1 )/12 = $ 6.67 cost of HW/mo.
300 watts: .3*.26*24*30 = $56.00 cost of system power alone /mo.
AC cost? who knows?
So at $73.00/mo for EC2 us CA users are bucks ahead!!!!!

BTW: CA power in my area is the all time high for the US I think!!!

(And yes, I’m still prepping a monster EC2 post about how we’re using it. Sorry I suck!)

So where’s this fabled EC2 post?

In some respects, $ for $ for raw performance, using your own hardware could still be more effective, but as Don mentioned, the ability to spawn 1000 instances for an hour is where EC2 wins. In a more real world scenario where your $ for $ performance mattered, you could build your infrastructure around your own hardware with the capacity to leverage EC2 under high loads. Building your own hardware to grow by 250% (if each instance is 1/4th a normal one) can be very costly, but with EC2, there is no upfront costs.

Overall, it is probably better to put stuff where performance matters on your own hardware, and put stuff where scalability/elasticity matters on EC2, or to allow overflow for performance stuff on EC2.

“Doesn’t sound like you have a performance problem, it sounds more like you have
a $ / CPU complaint. (Which in your case may be totally valid, and IMHO, more
important than the actual performance. But I was only talking about raw
performance, not the cost of that performance”

This is isomorphic to a performance problem. Most startup companies that use EC2
don’t have an infinite budget. So $ for $ you’re running 1/Nth slower on EC2.

This is assuming that your application is slower on EC2.

We don’t/can’t use EC2 becuase we’re too close to the hardware. SSD+RAID tuning,
etc prevents us from thinking about virtualizing our hardware. That and the
prices is about 4x more for EC2 when you factor in bandwidth.

ServerBeach does a great job for us…. basically almost identical to EC2 in
that you can bring new hardware up in about 1-2 hours. You can’t shut it down
easily like EC2 though..

For our internal real-world benchmarks, the process is simple:

- grab a variety of photos & videos
- time how long they take to render

Since that’s all our EC2 instances do, it’s the only metric we care about.

As for this particular test case, though, we used the simple Ruby benchmark linked in the thread above.

Thanks,
- Chris