>> Well now... It seems that even if you store some absurd amount of data 
>> like 1GB (think how many years that would take to upload...) it costs 
>> less than 50p/month. Which is nothing. (I currently pay £5/month.)
> 
> Yep. I think my last bill was seventeen cents.

To quote the bitch from Friends, "ooo, that's *interesting*!"

>> On the other hand, 30 days of instance time on EC2 is almost 80$. 
>> Exchange rates vary, but this compares wildly unfavourably with my 
>> current hosts' demands of £15/month.
> 
> Is that for a machine where you can install your own OS and such? Or is 
> that for just a web host, where you're (for example) sharing an Apache 
> server with others?

That's for root SSH access to a Linux box that you can install whatever 
you want on. (Although presumably you can't change the OS - how would 
you talk to it while you're installing it?) Several flavours of Linux 
availbable.

It is a *virtual* server though - your stuff runs in a virtualisation 
system. (They claim to guarantee a certain minimum performance level 
though.)

If you want a *dedicated* server (i.e., a real physical box that's just 
for you) it's drastically more expensive - like £90/month or something.

>> The verdict: EC2 is absurdly expensive.
> 
> It's also designed for you to rent it briefly, not for a long time. 

As with any kind of renting, there will always be a point where renting 
becomes more expensive than buying. The question is only where that 
point is.

If you just want to *run* stuff, EC2 sets the tipping point really, 
really low. (E.g., the POV-Ray thing I'm currently trying to do will 
probably take at least a week, more likely a month. And I want to do a 
whole series of others afterwards. For the price EC2 want, I could 
probably buy a killer PC several times over.)

The advantace of EC2 is either
- You only want it for a little while.
- You want to do something that requires massive amounts of Internet 
bandwidth.

Buying a PC which out-performs EC2 in compute terms only isn't 
expensive. Beating the connectivity EC2 is likely to have would be... 
uh... "expensive".

> If you want to rent a machine for three hours to do a 
> render, it makes a lot of sense.

It does? Surely it would make more sense to just run it on my own PC for 
3 hours, while I go watch TV or something. Costs £0. :-P

>> For about £200 you could *buy* a half-decent PC. If you leave it 
>> running for 1 year, it will have cost you [slightly more than] £200.
> 
> Well, you would need the connectivity too, which I understand is pretty 
> expensive where you are. :-)

Maybe that's it: Rendering stuff doesn't require gigabit Internet access!

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> That's for root SSH access to a Linux box that you can install whatever
 
> you want on. (Although presumably you can't change the OS - how would 
> you talk to it while you're installing it?) Several flavours of Linux 
> availbable.

Impressive.  (Cost-wise, I mean.)  I guess this is one of the great wins 
of 
virtualization.

> It is a *virtual* server though - your stuff runs in a virtualisation 
> system. (They claim to guarantee a certain minimum performance level 
> though.)

Same with Amazon, I expect. They talk about it as "equivalent to a ...." 
so 
I assume it's a shared image thingie.  Especially since you boot it by 
giving it an image split into a bunch of parts on S3, so there's got to b
e a 
pretty sophisticated boot loader going on there already.

> As with any kind of renting, there will always be a point where renting
 
> becomes more expensive than buying. The question is only where that 
> point is.

Agreed. It's also designed for you to (for example) spin up more servers 
for 
your shopping carts during the christmas rush.

> If you just want to *run* stuff, EC2 sets the tipping point really, 
> really low. (E.g., the POV-Ray thing I'm currently trying to do will 
> probably take at least a week, more likely a month. And I want to do a 

> whole series of others afterwards. For the price EC2 want, I could 
> probably buy a killer PC several times over.)

Sure.  I'm not trying to defend ECC's pricing, mind. :-)

> Buying a PC which out-performs EC2 in compute terms only isn't 
> expensive. Beating the connectivity EC2 is likely to have would be... 
> uh... "expensive".

You pay for the bandwidth, too. Not a lot, but again you have to measure 
how 
much you need and what it'll cost.

>> If you want to rent a machine for three hours to do a render, it makes
 
>> a lot of sense.
> 
> It does? Surely it would make more sense to just run it on my own PC fo
r 
> 3 hours, while I go watch TV or something. Costs £0. :-P

Assuming you didn't have one you could render on, of course.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Why is there a chainsaw in DOOM?
   There aren't any trees on Mars.

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>> That's for root SSH access to a Linux box that you can install 
>> whatever you want on. (Although presumably you can't change the OS - 
>> how would you talk to it while you're installing it?) Several flavours 
>> of Linux availbable.
> 
> Impressive.  (Cost-wise, I mean.)  I guess this is one of the great wins 
> of virtualization.

Indeed yes.

>> It is a *virtual* server though - your stuff runs in a virtualisation 
>> system. (They claim to guarantee a certain minimum performance level 
>> though.)
> 
> Same with Amazon, I expect.

Yeah. Although the fact that it takes a minute or two to start up makes 
me think it's spending time trying to find a free machine to run it on. 
Maybe each physical machine runs up to X virtual machines or something? 
(I would imagine transfering a runnin image from place to place would be 
infeasieble, even in a datacenter.)

>> As with any kind of renting, there will always be a point where 
>> renting becomes more expensive than buying. The question is only where 
>> that point is.
> 
> Agreed. It's also designed for you to (for example) spin up more servers 
> for your shopping carts during the christmas rush.

Indeed. If you're a company and you're large enough to actually need 
*more than one* server at short notice, EC2 totally makes sense. For an 
individual user who just wants some POV-Ray time... EC2 does not, even 
remotely, make sense.

>> Buying a PC which out-performs EC2 in compute terms only isn't 
>> expensive. Beating the connectivity EC2 is likely to have would be... 
>> uh... "expensive".
> 
> You pay for the bandwidth, too. Not a lot, but again you have to measure 
> how much you need and what it'll cost.

You can easily buy a machine, put it in your kitchen, and leave it 
running all day. But you can't easily get seriously low latency to the 
Internet. EC2 gives you that. ;-)

>>> If you want to rent a machine for three hours to do a render, it 
>>> makes a lot of sense.
>>
>> It does? Surely it would make more sense to just run it on my own PC 
>> for 3 hours, while I go watch TV or something. Costs £0. :-P
> 
> Assuming you didn't have one you could render on, of course.

Well, you need to own a PC in order to design it in the first place. ;-) 
Plus, as I say, buying a PC works out vastly cheaper than using EC2 if 
all you want is computer time.

Now, how does GPGPU change this picture? ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Yeah. Although the fact that it takes a minute or two to start up makes 
> me think it's spending time trying to find a free machine to run it on. 

It might be that, altho I'd expect it's more a matter of transferring the 
multi-gigabyte OS from S3, decompressing and decrypting it, putting it on 
the disk as a virtual drive, and then booting it up.

> Maybe each physical machine runs up to X virtual machines or something? 

That would be my guess, especially since they guarantee a certain amount of 
performance, and they let you pick how many CPUs you'll have, and so on. :-)

> (I would imagine transfering a runnin image from place to place would be 
> infeasieble, even in a datacenter.)

Shouldn't be *too* hard, if all you're talking about is moving the disk 
image. It's not like you get to hook up special devices or anything. It 
would lose all the TCP connections, most likely.

> individual user who just wants some POV-Ray time... EC2 does not, even 
> remotely, make sense.

Unless you want to spin up 20 machines for one hour to do a trace, say. :-) 
Or if you don't have access to the sort of thing you're talking about.

> Well, you need to own a PC in order to design it in the first place. ;-) 

True. Depends of course on how studly your machine is. You started this by 
complaining you couldn't let the render run overnight, didn't you? :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Why is there a chainsaw in DOOM?
   There aren't any trees on Mars.

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On Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:11:27 +0000, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> Yeah. Although the fact that it takes a minute or two to start up makes
> me think it's spending time trying to find a free machine to run it on.
> Maybe each physical machine runs up to X virtual machines or something?

There are systems out there that allow dynamic reallocation of physical 
resources for virtual systems, so for example if you have 5 VMs running 
on a single physical box and the performance spikes on one of the VMs, 
the others can be dynamically moved to another physical system even while 
running.

Some of the features of large-scale virtualization farms are quite 
impressive these days in being able to do that.  "Workload management" is 
the term I hear our marketing folks (yeah, Novell has marketing folks!) 
use.

The server farm that we use for our practical exams currently doesn't do 
that, but I'm talking with the implementation team about how we could 
dynamically scale if we needed to, and there's a solution available from 
a company we bought in 2008 (which of course should make it incredibly 
cheap for us to use internally).

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