Amazon Introduces Bidding For EC2 Compute Time 52
ryanvm alerts us to Amazon's beta announcement this morning for what it is calling Spot Instances, which represent a name-your-own-price way of using the elastic compute service. Here is Amazon's documentation on the feature.
"For customers with flexibility in when their applications can run, Spot Instances can significantly lower their Amazon EC2 costs. Additionally, Spot Instances can provide access to large amounts of additional capacity for applications with urgent needs." Customers can use the EC2 API to see recent spot prices.
Permutation city (Score:4, Interesting)
Reminds me of:
Great book. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_city [wikipedia.org].
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Yes. All we need now is the software which Egans characters were using to simulate their personalities.
Re:Permutation city (Score:4, Insightful)
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I agree. Greg Egan is my favorite SF writer.
nifty (Score:2, Interesting)
if only i needed more cpu power for something..
Instance creation? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Instance creation? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Instance creation? (Score:4, Insightful)
Initially when you get your EC2 account, it is limited to 20 concurrent VMs. You then have to request to have this limit increased, but the same pricing applies (at least up to 200 concurrent VMs)
Having accounts limited to 20 VMs means that a single user can't sign up and start to flood the system. Also they make no guarantees that a request to start up a VM will succeed unless you have a reserved instance, which has a yearly cost attached.
What this spot pricing does is provide a financial incentive for customers to move load to off peak times rather than adding to the load during peak demand. This in turn should flatten out the load on EC2 (depending on how much load can and will be moved to the off peak times).
In the end this is simple supply and demand economics, and a lot of people in academia have been carrying on about this and a "cloud marketplaces" for quite some time...
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No, the limit for On Demand instance creation is still 20 instances per account (but it is allowed by amazon TOS to create multiple accounts, hint hint).
The limit for Spot instances (the kind described in the summary) defaults to 100 per account.
As you note above, you can get that limit raised by Amazon, upon request.
Indictment of cloud computing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Indictment of cloud computing? (Score:4, Informative)
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minus admin time as the admin time will be roughly the same either way.
Admin time is not at all "the same"; do you have any idea how much time it costs and how much risk is involved in ordering, configuring, and high-end machines? Then there's the room, the power supplies, the racks, all the supporting infrastructure.
Also, when you buy them, you are stuck with those machines--you have sunk costs. The less you use them, the more you pay for the hours that you do use them.
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You're really confused when you compare the size of machines to host virtual instances with the size of the actual instances themselves. For instances, 32G is big, even today.
And it's nice that "you" are moving to "90% virtualization internally", but what that tells me is that you get paid to do that sort of thing, so I hope you put your salary and the salary of everybody else needed to order, deploy, and maintain your virtualization into the computation (the cost of setting up instances is the same).
Basic
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OK, they fire me, who's going to setup, configure, and maintain the cloud VM's?
Which part of "the cost of setting up instances is the same" did you not understand?
There is no magic pixie dust despite what IBM and PHB's would like to think, companies need digital janitor's to feed and care for the complex machines that run the company and that's exactly what I do.
So? Even if your company is so small that you're the single IT person and you spend x% of your time setting up virtualization infrastructure (not
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ELASTIC Compute Cloud (Score:4, Informative)
3 year TCO for such a machine in my environment today would be about $8k
Ahh, but what would the 1 hour TCO for that machine? And how quickly could you get me 100 of them? And what if after a week, I don't need them anymore. Do I have to continue paying for them?
What if I need 1000? But only for a few days? Can you even fit 1000 in your data center?
EC2 is for elastic computing needs. The price will never compare favorably to static computing on a 3-year basis.
By the way, your 8k is very low compared to what you'd have to pay to get the same featureset of Amazon Web Services. What happens if your data center catches fire? How quickly could you get that machine up and running in a new data center, and at what cost? How quickly could you upgrade the storage? Backup online to fault-tolerant storage? Clone that machine?
What if I want to to load testing of my application? Can you get me a full copy of my production environment and let me quit paying for it once my load testing is done? How much would that cost?
What about staging my application before production deployment? Do I have to pay a full year for a server I plan on using for like 100 hours of that year, tops?
Bottom line: There are a many use cases that call for elastic resources. Comparing EC2 with an ordinary server makes no sense, because they are different tools for different jobs.
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I think his point was more that they are setting prices in a way where they aren't losing money (they do eventually have to have actual hardware somewhere, which is where the cost comparison comes in).
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The EC2 systems are completely separate from the systems that run amazon.com. (According to a seminar on EC2 by Amazon folks I attended at an NYLUG meeting in October.)
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I am looking at a single smaller machine. My current dedicated server is ~$200/month. Thats about $7.5k over 3 years. The equivalent EC2 reserved instance is only $350+$0.03/hour. That's $788 total for 3 years or a tenth of the price! Sounds like a hot deal to me
Of
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Variable pricing(down to the point where electricity costs make it cheaper to just turn them off and suck up the losses, of course) is completely logical for dealing with any unused capacity, and it can't have cost Amazon all that much to hack this pricing scheme into their existing system.
If there is usually some capacity available, with a small discount in exchange for having no availability guarantee(or even implication), with
Re:Indictment of cloud computing? (Score:5, Insightful)
In order for EC2 capacity to be highly available (I haven't yet heard of people waiting in a queue for hours for an instance), it seems obvious that Amazon must have a large amount of computing power in standby.
This process of auctioning off the extra processing power based on fluctuating capacity seems like a win-win situation for Amazon AND users. Users who want increased processing, but are not time-bound, can get "off-peak" rates. Meanwhile Amazon can make money off the "idle" processors which are still available to be reserved as an EC2 instance.
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In order for EC2 capacity to be highly available (I haven't yet heard of people waiting in a queue for hours for an instance), it seems obvious that Amazon must have a large amount of computing power in standby.
They do, since they have to be able to handle peak loads around Christmas and so forth. It just makes good financial sense to make some money off of all that infrastructure when it's not in use.
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[Amazon] do, since they have to be able to handle peak loads around Christmas and so forth. It just makes good financial sense to make some money off of all that infrastructure when it's not in use.
There's this great myth that Amazon need all this capacity for handling Christmas. They don't. It may have started that way, but now their infrastructure for handling services is much larger than that. (IIRC, they passed that level sometime last year, or maybe even back in 2007.) They are now a cloud provider that happens to sell stuff (books, etc) on the side.
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If I'm reading their SEC filings correctly, 54% of their sales revenue comes from books and movies, 43% from electronics and random crap, and 3% comes from cloud computing.
Looks to me like they're very much still a retailer, albeit one who has started selling off compute capacity.
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And you don't think their clients suffer from Christmas peak loads? Even if you don't sell things, it's a time of year with a lot of vacation time.
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No, I don't think so. More likely they already own outrageous capacity to handle the December retail crunch but don't use anything close to that capacity in any other month of the year. So I doubt there's any additional investment in capacity for EC2. EC2 utilizes what Amazon already owns.
If you read Werner's blog entry on this new feature you'll see they reserve the right to interrupt a Spot Instance and essentially restart it later on. You need to make sure whatever you're doing with that instance you
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Are you predicting rain? If so how much compute power did it take?
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If you're using Amazon for hosting, you can't switch hosting services; their system is too nonstandard. Do you want to be in a position where they can raise prices or cut off your air supply?
EC2 allows you to setup your own servers on their infrastructure. Ultimately, this is as standard as getting a virtual or dedicated server at any one of thousands of other hosting providers. Switching is as easy as replicating the environment you've created for yourself (which is likely a standard LAMP stack anyways) and then doing a DNS change.
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This doesn't mean that EC2 is necessarily a good idea, or that Amazon couldn't slip you a nasty dose of strategic downtime if they, for some reason, felt like it; but their ability to exert lock-in in the medium term is pretty weak.
Re:It's too proprietary (Score:4, Interesting)
but their ability to exert lock-in in the medium term is pretty weak
Which is related to their strength, for me. I use them precisely because of the short term availability. We ran a test job just today on their service to test the scalability of a routine. Bought 20 2 core machines for 4 hours for I think $64 or so. I'd have to have at least 4 big multi-core servers lying around idle to have that available for a test bed, best case about $12,000 for the bunch (I've priced them in the last month, this [siliconmechanics.com] is the best choice I found. That's 4 separate servers in a single 2U chassis. I have several boxes from these guys, they are very solid, are 2/3 the price of Dell, and don't need a blade cabinet.)
I wouldn't use EC2 for long term use, but for short term, or speculative use, it's a pretty good deal. I've found them to be pretty stable and easy to use.
Brilliant market for surplus (Score:2)
Re:Brilliant market for surplus (Score:5, Funny)
I know the USD has been slipping but surely grid electricity is still a cheaper source of energy then using your own greenback powered generator?
Overbuilt & Aging Rapidly (Score:1)
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That's certainly a benefit.
Possibly not, but if you've already built an infrastructure around EC2, you may not have stuff sitting around your shop intended for that use, and it may make more sense to leverage EC2 for the occasional task of this type, if Amazon provides pricing
The Next thing that will happen... (Score:2)
hackers will going to drive up the price of using the EC2 cloud.
good. Now can I buy mobile bandwidth that way? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is good (Score:2)
This is the same way that electricity is sold between providers -- on 6-minute interval bidding arrangements.
Of course, today only Amazon is providing the service.