Amazon EC2 hosting,

[Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda]

2010/10/10 Ori Idan <ori at helicontech.co.il>

>
> 2010/10/10 Tom Rosenfeld <trosenfeld at gmail.com>
>
> Hi,
>> I just came across this thread from back in Aug about Amazon's cloud.
>>
>> I'd like to add that I have been a satisfied customer of Amazon for over a
>> year, using their services for both consulting at at my current job where we
>> use it to run our SaaS offering. The capabilities keep improving and the
>> prices keep coming down. Their lowest end server is now just 2 cents an
>> hour!
>>
>> There are some issues with the IO, but it is certainly adequate for all
>> but high performance needs. We use 8 way stripped disks and get about 100
>> MBp/s sequential reads.
>>
>> If anyone wants more details, I'll be happy to share with you.
>>
>> -tom
>>
>>
> I am considering using EC2 for a web application.
> I am not sure how to calculate the payment per month.
> Do I pay only for the time someone makes a request?
> For example, I have a user who requests a certain report and it takes 1
> second to load the report request form, then 20 seconds to produce the
> report and print it.
> I understand that I pay for 21 seconds?
>

In addition to mistakes already corrected, there is another mistake of how
long something takes. Amazon aim to provide a certain computation power
unit, but benchmarks show that what is actually provided has high
variability. For example, ping times to EC2 machines started rising
significantly since Amazon announces the spot instances. See also:

Alexandru Iosup, Nezih Yigitbasi, and Dick Epema, On the Performance
Variability of Production Cloud Services PDS technical report PDS-2010-002:
http://pds.twi.tudelft.nl/reports/2010/PDS-2010-002.pdf

-- 
Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda.
http://ladypine.org
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