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Comment by UK-AL | Hacker News Reader

"AWS is expensive, as soon as we start an instance, we’re billed for the entire hour, even if we only need to run a 2 minute test on it."

What you really needed to do was design algorithm that keeps machines running over period in time, according to a general trend. Not shutdown, and instantly bootup for every customer deciding to run tests.

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I'm glad I'm not the only person that thought this, because I'm a HPC batch admin and that sort of machine packing is just what I do.

I'm glad they found a solution which seems to work out really well for their use case. Changing the algorithm to use the machine for an hour would imply that some tests may wait to be run, and that could be a bad thing for TestingBot (I'm not sure what their SLA is).

Going to their own "cloud" though will require them to either overbuy capacity or eventually make a push to increase utilization, so they may end up making that algo anyhow.

The reality is that once you reach a reasonable level of scale (multiple physical machines), the cost savings from going to your own cloud will easily allow you to afford that extra capacity and then some.

I disagree that it's the only reality. Definitely there is a scale where paying a sysadmin makes more sense than paying a provider for their sysadmin skills.

There is another situation, which I would argue is the "enterprise" situation, where you will want to pay your programmers to make the changes because they're fixed overhead rather than capital expenditures. This scenario comes because of an internal push to save money (adding significant capacity costs too much), or because adding any sort of capacity increases operational complexity more than it increases code complexity. It's a much larger scale than where TestingBot is at, but a problem they probably hope to encounter one day.

Except, if you are running customer supplied code on the instance then you've made the sandboxing problem that much more difficult.

I'd much sooner have a clean VM to run my tests on than have to think about the ways the previous user might have left things in an insecure state.

Exactly, now we guarantee a pristine VM for every single test, something which was not possible with our setup on EC2.

Something completely possible with mounting a new EBS volume with a pristine image or simply instructing to replace the instances current volume...

As far as I know you have to stop the instance to mount a fresh EBS volume, which means as soon as you start up the instance with the new volume you're paying for another full hour again.

You pay for another hour every time you do that, that was the point.

This can solved by containerization.

What you really needed to do was move to Google who bill by the minute.

Not a Google shill by the way - I don't have a preference yet. However, for that particular complaint, Google has the solution.

I think you get billed for at least 10min... still better than 1 hour though.

When/if Amazon notice significant churn heading Google's way, I expect one of the things they'll look at is their billing time granularity.

Right, 10 min upfront, then by the minute. The last minute chunk is discarded from billing if it was actually used less than 15 sec.

Or so I remember from reading the ToS yesterday.

The command-line cloud utility is so much easier than Amazon's. Everything is in one place. ssh keys are managed automatically. In less than 1 hour I was able to do everything with Google, whereas it took me a couple days to feel comfortable with AWS.

Azure bills by the minute as well.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/06/03/windows-az...

True, but it doesn't always play well with non-msft tech stacks.

> True, but it doesn't always play well with non-msft tech stacks

In what way?? I mean thsi honestly.

We use linux vms on azure with no problems at all. What non-msft tech stacks doesn't it "play well with"?

I'm pretty interested in your experiences with linux on azure. I've been to both azure and aws workshops, and I found the azure presenters to be somewhat hostile towards alternative operating systems. They had a slide saying they linux was 100% supported, but they didn't talk to it at all. In fact, it was nearly comical how the presenter didn't want to touch my mac to help with setup.

From my reading, azure seems to be pretty awesome as far as integration with visual studio, but is seriously lacking when it comes to features on their load balancer etc. Their security model is kinda weird too, where defaults open your firewall to the rest of azure commonly.

So that's just my ideas, what are your experiences?

have you seen AWS opsworks?

I'm sorry you had a bad experience at the Azure workshop. There are a lot of people running those types of events both inside and outside of Microsoft and the quality is all over the map. Unfortunately a lot of technical people at Microsoft are still very insular. They primarily interact with Microsoft friendly .NET developers and rarely have to stray into the big scary world of *nix. They probably don't talk about the Linux support or help with your Mac because it would show their ignorance on the subject.

Fortunately there is also another side of Microsoft. A side which is doing fantastic work in the open source community as well as with things like the Linux support in Azure. I would be happy to talk more about Linux support in Azure and I am more than capable of helping out with any setup required, regardless of your operating system of choice.

If you're still interested, you can reach me at tistrimp@microsoft.com

Are many people using so few aws services that they are able to move to google? It seems like a hassle to use google for VMs and file storage, while having to still use amazon for all the other services google doesn't offer.

If it takes people to code it, it's still part of the expenses for running in that environment.

The relevant and important difference being that this is a one-time expense. It contributes almost nothing to the cost unless you do this then immediately drop the platform.

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