{"id":1712,"date":"2012-01-02T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-02T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/otava.test\/999hour-for-an-amazon-cloud-server\/"},"modified":"2012-01-02T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-01-02T00:00:00","slug":"999hour-for-an-amazon-cloud-server","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.otava.com\/blog\/999hour-for-an-amazon-cloud-server\/","title":{"rendered":"$999\/Hour for An Amazon Cloud Server?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Would you pay $999 per hour for a cloud server? Apparently, Amazon\u2019s EC2 cloud servers spiked to $999.99 per hour when their supply was recently constrained.\u00a0 The high bidder paid close to $1000 per hour and others got bumped off of their servers.<\/p>\n

One month\u2019s use of the server at this price would cost a ridiculous $729,992.70 – more than the cost to purchase an entire mainframe and host it in a high-end data center<\/a> for 5 years. Admittedly, it is a far-fetched scenario for the spot demand for Amazon cloud servers to stay that high for an entire month, but it raises some interesting questions about the predictability and usability of the Amazon cloud.<\/p>\n

I found this discussion thread<\/a> on the Amazon Cloud forum to be both informative and puzzling.<\/p>\n

This left me with a couple of takeaway points:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The Amazon cloud isn\u2019t as straight-forward to use as mission critical cloud servers<\/a> that companies like Online Tech<\/a> offer.\u00a0 To use Amazon, you have to design your software around their architecture, availability zones, etc.<\/li>\n
  2. The basic on-demand model charges by a complex set of computation factors such as CPU clock hours, I\/O requests, API requests and others \u2013 all of which are very difficult to predict in an application.\u00a0 Amazon posted this slide deck<\/a> to encourage you to \u201cmodel, measure, monitor, multiply and master\u201d- the cost model associated with the Amazon cloud. Looking at the slide deck had me walking away less confident that I was able to model the pricing without an engineering investment to figure it out.<\/li>\n
  3. While the on-demand model is complex enough, the spot market pricing for Amazon EC2 instances is even less predictable, as the forum post discusses.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    At the end of the day, it\u2019s difficult to be convinced that this is truly \u201cspot market\u201d pricing when only one party controls the supply side of the market. I\u2019m left with the feeling that playing the spot market for Amazon cloud servers is like gambling against the house \u2013 only one party is truly in a position to win.<\/p>\n

    While this may sound like I\u2019m slamming Amazon as a competitor, the reality is that we rarely compete.\u00a0 Amazon has different goals, market and business plan for their cloud servers than we do. Users design to the Amazon cloud to leverage the automation capability, and thus need to buy into their system architecture. Clients leverage our easy-to-use, high availability cloud<\/a> servers for mission critical applications that they want to run over the long haul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Would you pay $999 per hour for a cloud server? Apparently, Amazon\u2019s EC2 cloud servers spiked to $999.99 per hour when their supply was recently constrained.\u00a0 The high bidder paid close to $1000 per hour and others got bumped off of their servers. One month\u2019s use of the server at this price would cost a ridiculous $729,992.70 – more than the cost to purchase an entire mainframe and host it in a high-end data center for 5 years. Admittedly, it is a far-fetched scenario for the spot demand for Amazon cloud servers to stay that high for an entire month, but it raises some interesting questions about the predictability and usability of the Amazon cloud. I found this discussion thread on the Amazon Cloud forum to be both informative and puzzling. This left me with a couple of takeaway points: The Amazon cloud isn\u2019t as straight-forward to use as mission critical cloud servers that companies like Online Tech offer.\u00a0 To use Amazon, you have to design your software around their architecture, availability zones, etc. The basic on-demand model charges by a complex set of computation factors such as CPU clock hours, I\/O requests, API requests and others \u2013 all of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"other_category":[],"class_list":["post-1712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n$999\/Hour for An Amazon Cloud Server? | OTAVA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.otava.com\/blog\/999hour-for-an-amazon-cloud-server\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"$999\/Hour for An Amazon Cloud Server?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Would you pay $999 per hour for a cloud server? Apparently, Amazon\u2019s EC2 cloud servers spiked to $999.99 per hour when their supply was recently constrained.\u00a0 The high bidder paid close to $1000 per hour and others got bumped off of their servers. One month\u2019s use of the server at this price would cost a ridiculous $729,992.70 – more than the cost to purchase an entire mainframe and host it in a high-end data center for 5 years. Admittedly, it is a far-fetched scenario for the spot demand for Amazon cloud servers to stay that high for an entire month, but it raises some interesting questions about the predictability and usability of the Amazon cloud. I found this discussion thread on the Amazon Cloud forum to be both informative and puzzling. This left me with a couple of takeaway points: The Amazon cloud isn\u2019t as straight-forward to use as mission critical cloud servers that companies like Online Tech offer.\u00a0 To use Amazon, you have to design your software around their architecture, availability zones, etc. The basic on-demand model charges by a complex set of computation factors such as CPU clock hours, I\/O requests, API requests and others \u2013 all of...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.otava.com\/blog\/999hour-for-an-amazon-cloud-server\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"OTAVA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2012-01-02T00:00:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Irma Brillantes\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Irma Brillantes\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"2 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.otava.com\/blog\/999hour-for-an-amazon-cloud-server\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.otava.com\/blog\/999hour-for-an-amazon-cloud-server\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Irma Brillantes\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.otava.com\/#\/schema\/person\/35774075f8f4fcdd4eae80cb72034263\"},\"headline\":\"$999\/Hour for An Amazon Cloud Server?\",\"datePublished\":\"2012-01-02T00:00:00+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.otava.com\/blog\/999hour-for-an-amazon-cloud-server\/\"},\"wordCount\":424,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.otava.com\/#organization\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.otava.com\/blog\/999hour-for-an-amazon-cloud-server\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.otava.com\/blog\/999hour-for-an-amazon-cloud-server\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.otava.com\/blog\/999hour-for-an-amazon-cloud-server\/\",\"name\":\"$999\/Hour for An Amazon Cloud Server? 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