Surprised they’re doing fixed leases. I would have thought a fixed base with a layer of spot priced VMs for peaks would be more efficient on cost
To illustrate a 128GB ram 20 core server with a 10Gbps NIC and some small SSD storage is probably going to cost you <$2000 USD for a years rental.
If that works out to same prices as keeping compute at literally your peak requirement level round the clock then something is very wrong somewhere. Maybe that issue is not in-house at blacksmith - perhaps spot pricing is a joke...but something there doesn't check out.
Loads of companies do scaling with much less predictable patterns.
>risk of slowdowns
Yeah you do probably want the scaling to be super conservative...but -80% fluctuation is a comically large gap to not actively scale
>To illustrate
Better view I'd say is: That chart looks like ~4.5 peak. So you're paying for 730 hours of peak capacity and using all of it about 90 hrs.
Given that they wrote a blog about this topic they probably have a good reason for doing it this way. Just doesn't really make sense to me based on given info
m7i.4xlarge on AWS spot price right now is $0.39/hour whereas renting the server is about half that per hour.
>whereas renting the server is about half that per hour.
If you're at capacity only 90 out of 730 a month then paying 2x for spot to cover those peaks is a slam dunk
another thing to note is that we bootstrap the hosts, and tune them a decent amount, to support certain high-performance features which takes time and makes control + fixed-term ownership desirable
[disclaimer: i work at blacksmith]