Amazon Web Services: EC2
30 May 2007Most of the people that needs to manage with lots of information and bandwidth already know the existence of Amazon S3. It provides a developer-friendly and simplistic usage-based storage solution (oh yeah: please Amazon, hire me). Anyway, it’s probably nothing really new aside from the pricing model.
Now in beta (one of those awful recurrent Web 2.0 words that doesn’t mean anymore what it was supposed to mean) Amazon is offering EC2. The solution, in the same line than S3, provide usage-based computer power. The pricing follows the same idea: you pay exactly for what you use. To start, you need to upload an image of your system to an S3 account and there you go. You can do your own image or start from one of the images offered by Amazon. In your images you can include as many software as you need, did I say we are talking about Linux images? And of course, you have your shell access to the machine with your root account. So, to be short, we are talking about hosting: who needs a VPS when we have the Amazon cloud of computing power? Instead of a slice in a machine you get a slice of the whole server farm.
Let’s compare the VPS that is running this site with the Amazon offer:
VPSVillage 10$ Plan Amazon EC2 Instance Processor 1 Athlon 64 3800+ 1.7GHz x86 RAM 128MB 1792MB Local HD 8GB 160GB2 Network Bandwidth ~16Mbps 3 250Mbps Data Transfer 500GB Usage-based Pricing Cost/Month 10$ 72$
At the first glance, if we check the pricing of EC2, it could seem really cheap, but $.10/hour is $72/month and we haven’t started to pay the data transfers and the S3 storage. Anyway, is not so bad compared to what we’ve got. Let’s see how much we would pay if we assume that we are exhausting to the limits the transfer of our VPS plan.
We will ignore the storage, as you could easily use S3 with the VPS and 8GB of storage in EC2 are inexpensive. I’ve supposed that 80% of the traffic is user-downloaded and the rest is uploaded. I haven’t considered the cost per request (10.000 GETs are $.01)
UL_Cost + DL_Cost
0.2*500*0.10 + 0.8*500*0.18 = $82
Wow, more money… Actually, 500GB of data transfer is a lot if you’re not planning to host big pictures and videos. As a proof, codinghorror (a developer blog that is usually slashdotted/digged) peaked 9GB in one day of his most memorable posts. If you’re able to use 500GB of data transfer, I think you can get the extra bandwidth money easily with adsense or another advertisement tool. I would say that the S3 bandwidth can be paid by itself (again, if you’re not running a flickr/youtube clone).
Who knows? Maybe Amazon just started EC2 when they realized about all that people moving his heavy content to S3.
About the cost of the EC2 service, I think is quite fair. The connection is said to be fast, so let’s say we believe is at least the half (still a lot); almost 2GB of RAM are pretty good and is actually more necessary than a fast processor. Anyway, if you need more computer power, EC2 can launch more Instances for you (of course, with the consequent charging), that’s being scalable!
EC2 could be a great hosting option for a medium site that doesn’t want to buy his own hardware and go for a colocation center. And it offers, probably, the most scalable solution in the hosting market. Nevertheless, I’m afraid it’s not a valid option for my modest weblog (that’s not too difficult to see). I would have gotten crazy to find cheaper such a cool hosting option less than one month after buying my VPS :).
1 Actually, on a VPS that processor is not only for you; besides, we don’t really know the specs of the “processor” that Amazon says to be “offering”. So, let’s say that I leave this information as an anecdotical fact.
2 Those 160GB are just the size of the image, after that you can go on storing content in your S3 account, and the transfers between S3 and EC2 are free!
3 Measured downloading the last Linux kernel at 28/05/07 - 16:40 UTC (42MB).
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