Largest VM in the Cloud

azure.microsoft.com

59 points·numo16··11 comments

$7,180/month, $86,160/year. That's a pretty penny.

That VM nearly costs one whole engineer!

Or several baremetal servers, amortized over 3 years.

People seem to forget that EC2 stands for Elastic Cloud Compute. Emphasis on elastic. If you you use the Elastic Cloud Compute in a non-elastic manner then you're doing it wrong. If you need dedicated hardware then there are many services that specialize in precisely that.

(Yes I know this is Azure not EC2. The point remains.)

There's a very good value in having a big fat database machine which is next to a nice, elastic pool of servers as well as other services, like block storage. You pay for collocation with your other services.

I think that ship has sailed. Even Amazon offers heavy reserved instances, which are expected to be on 24/7 (you pay for every hour in the month even if you're not running a machine).

Yes, but occasionally they will retire instances, and notify you. If you don't spin it up as another instance, well, sucks to be you when it disappears. Actually pretty simple, but you can't just set it and forget it; you have to be prepared for some degree of elasticity.

Also note that reserved instances don't require you to pay for 24 hours X 30 days. It just gives you the right to pay a lower rate for the capacity you've reserved.

True, although they used to in specific cases - the AWS "heavy utilization" reservations would be charged if you had the server running or not.

Or 3 of them if you look in poorer countries.

Sometimes it's cheaper and faster to throw hardware at a problem rather than a human!

AWS 8xlarge servers have less RAM but are just as large otherwise. You can get two of those for less money than this Azure VM.

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