<story><title>AWS: the good, the bad and the ugly</title><url>http://blog.awe.sm/2012/12/18/aws-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blantonl</author><text>This is a great writeup and is completely on target for realistic deployments on AWS.&lt;p&gt;We&apos;re a big user of AWS (well, relative, but we run about $10K/month in costs through AWS), so I&apos;d like to supplement this outstanding blog post:&lt;p&gt;* I cannot emphasize enough how awesome Amazon&apos;s cost cuts are.  It is really nice to wake up in the morning and see that 40% of your costs are now going to drop 20% next month going forward.  (Like: Recent S3 cost cuts).  In Louisiana, we call this Lagniappe (A little something extra.)  We don&apos;t plan for it, nor budget for it, so it is a nice surprise every time it happens.&lt;p&gt;* We&apos;ve also completely abandoned EBS in favor of ephemeral storage except in two places:  some NFS and MySQL slaves that function as snapshot/backup hosts only.&lt;p&gt;* If the data you are storing isn&apos;t super critical, consider Amazon S3&apos;s reduced redundancy storage.  When you approach the 30-50TB level, it makes a difference in costs.&lt;p&gt;* RDS is still just a dream for us, since we still don&apos;t have a comfort level with performance.&lt;p&gt;* Elasticache has definitely been a winner and allowed us to replace our dedicated memcache instances.&lt;p&gt;* We&apos;re doing some initial testing with Route 53 (Amazon&apos;s DNS services) and so far so good, with great flexibility and a nice API into DNS.&lt;p&gt;* We&apos;re scared to death of AWS SNS - we currently use SendGrid and a long trusted existing server for email delivery.  Twillo will is our first choice for an upcoming SMS alerting project.&lt;p&gt;* If you are doing anything with streaming or high bandwidth work, AWS bandwidth is VERY expensive.  We&apos;ve opted to go with unmetered ports on a cluster of bare metal boxes with 1000TB.com.  That easily saves us $1000&apos;s  a month in bandwidth costs, and if we need overflow or have an outage there we can spin up temporary instances on AWS to provide short term coverage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghshephard</author><text>I don&apos;t get the 100tb.com model.  Checking out their website, I see:&lt;p&gt;Intel E3-12303.2 GHz8GB2 x 1TB100 TB$201.15
1Gbit Dedicated Port&lt;p&gt;So, for $200/month, they&apos;ll give me 100 Terabytes/bandwidth on this server.&lt;p&gt;250 megabit/second at 30 days in terabytes = 81 Terabytes.  A decently peered/connected Pipe costs, at this volume, around $5-$7/megabit @95th, or $1250.month.&lt;p&gt;So either:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  A) Their connectivity isn&apos;t hot.
  B) If you actually use that 100 Terabytes per server, 
     they start to curtail/rate limit/traffic shape you.
  C) Some other option I haven&apos;t considered?  Maybe they 
     just rely on the vast majority of their customers not 
     using that bandwidth, and subsidizing (significantly) 
     those that do?
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
blantonl, appreciate any insight you can provide - sounds like you&apos;ve got great control over your environment.  From the sounds of it, 100tb.com provides bandwidth @$0.33/megabit.</text></comment>
<story><title>AWS: the good, the bad and the ugly</title><url>http://blog.awe.sm/2012/12/18/aws-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blantonl</author><text>This is a great writeup and is completely on target for realistic deployments on AWS.&lt;p&gt;We&apos;re a big user of AWS (well, relative, but we run about $10K/month in costs through AWS), so I&apos;d like to supplement this outstanding blog post:&lt;p&gt;* I cannot emphasize enough how awesome Amazon&apos;s cost cuts are.  It is really nice to wake up in the morning and see that 40% of your costs are now going to drop 20% next month going forward.  (Like: Recent S3 cost cuts).  In Louisiana, we call this Lagniappe (A little something extra.)  We don&apos;t plan for it, nor budget for it, so it is a nice surprise every time it happens.&lt;p&gt;* We&apos;ve also completely abandoned EBS in favor of ephemeral storage except in two places:  some NFS and MySQL slaves that function as snapshot/backup hosts only.&lt;p&gt;* If the data you are storing isn&apos;t super critical, consider Amazon S3&apos;s reduced redundancy storage.  When you approach the 30-50TB level, it makes a difference in costs.&lt;p&gt;* RDS is still just a dream for us, since we still don&apos;t have a comfort level with performance.&lt;p&gt;* Elasticache has definitely been a winner and allowed us to replace our dedicated memcache instances.&lt;p&gt;* We&apos;re doing some initial testing with Route 53 (Amazon&apos;s DNS services) and so far so good, with great flexibility and a nice API into DNS.&lt;p&gt;* We&apos;re scared to death of AWS SNS - we currently use SendGrid and a long trusted existing server for email delivery.  Twillo will is our first choice for an upcoming SMS alerting project.&lt;p&gt;* If you are doing anything with streaming or high bandwidth work, AWS bandwidth is VERY expensive.  We&apos;ve opted to go with unmetered ports on a cluster of bare metal boxes with 1000TB.com.  That easily saves us $1000&apos;s  a month in bandwidth costs, and if we need overflow or have an outage there we can spin up temporary instances on AWS to provide short term coverage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pearkes</author><text>&amp;#62; We&apos;re scared to death of AWS SNS - we currently use SendGrid and a long trusted existing server for email delivery. Twillo will is our first choice for an upcoming SMS alerting project.&lt;p&gt;Can you elaborate on this a bit? Why are you scared of SNS? Data loss / latency etc?</text></comment>