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Comment by cdevs | Hacker News Reader

In response to Reserve pricing is bs..

We are moving to aws before the end of the year and it will be a 50% price cut from the dedicated providers we have been using. Our dedicated servers are just about out of space and their bs cloud environment is about 350$ for what you get for 70-80$ on linode. When we need 10-50 processing servers quickly cloned up we go to linode do our work and try to sling the data back ...it's all too annoying now. We're moving to aws, reserving some instances for our client front ends and and booting up what we have to when we need it for mapreduce jobs. For us reserve pricing isn't so bs.

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It gets a lot more challenging once you outgrow your initial reservations. Or maybe you find that you reserved the wrong sizes. As you add more reservations, it will become something that you are dealing with constantly.

It's terrible.

>Or maybe you find that you reserved the wrong sizes

You can resize RIs within the same family (ie 1 m4.xlarge to 2 m4.large)

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modify...

Yes, you can. But doing this is not "free", in that you are spending time doing this (potentially often) instead of an infinite number of other more productive things.

This alone isn't going to kill your productivity, but it's one of many of the annoyances of managing a large fleet using RIs. It's a cumulative burden, between figuring out reservations per-region, consider your baseline vs spot/on-demand levels, potentially put some other stuff you don't need on the RI market, and audit how many RIs in your inventory are actually in use.

This is an annoyance when you have a small fleet, but it quickly becomes an expensive nightmare when you start talking 100+ VMs. You start having to pay for expensive external tools to manage your expenses because this stuff sucks so much. Or write a ton of your own tooling (which is not free at all). Or just have someone who does this manually all the time (also really sucks).

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