Hosting in the Cloud?
Posted: Sun Apr 08, 2012 3:07 pm
One of our customers asked me why we make use our own metal, rather than using a Cloud service like that provided by Amazon.
I replied that it was a matter of cost - an EC2 instance with sufficient RAM and block storage would cost several times more than renting/leasing/buying a dedicated server.
If it is too expensive to use for hosting, how is it not too expensive to use for ANYTHING that isn't on a massive scale?
I can see the fault-tolarent advantages the technology offers, but I can't see the advantage over having metal-based fault tolarance, or simply having N+1 servers and running vmware or similar, which again would be cheaper.
In fact I can see how using AWS would be less reliable than your own metal - you can't tell if there's a potential fault on the physical server your instance is running on and might go BOOM any moment, potentially corrupting a critical database or file-write in the process. Sure, your instance would restart within moments elsewhere, but if something got corrupted when it went down, it might not work.
I'd be interested in comments on this, or maybe a pointer to a forum elswhere where it might have been discussed in the past.
I replied that it was a matter of cost - an EC2 instance with sufficient RAM and block storage would cost several times more than renting/leasing/buying a dedicated server.
If it is too expensive to use for hosting, how is it not too expensive to use for ANYTHING that isn't on a massive scale?
I can see the fault-tolarent advantages the technology offers, but I can't see the advantage over having metal-based fault tolarance, or simply having N+1 servers and running vmware or similar, which again would be cheaper.
In fact I can see how using AWS would be less reliable than your own metal - you can't tell if there's a potential fault on the physical server your instance is running on and might go BOOM any moment, potentially corrupting a critical database or file-write in the process. Sure, your instance would restart within moments elsewhere, but if something got corrupted when it went down, it might not work.
I'd be interested in comments on this, or maybe a pointer to a forum elswhere where it might have been discussed in the past.