Next Generation of Dense-Storage Instances for EC2
aws.amazon.com
aws.amazon.com
AWS really needs to get back in touch with reality.
$500 USD/mo for a server with 32G Ram and 3x2T disks is not 'affordable', it's a rip-off.
For that money you can rent 10 machines of that size at Hetzner/OVH - and they will be dedicated hardware.
I can get something like that for about 40 Euros [and guaranteed 100mb/s on 1 gbit port] with no setup fee and no lock in beyond 30 days.
Even with reserved pricing for 3 years its $5,715 = 5715/36 = ~$158/month + Bandwidth.
The TCO with Amazon is only cheap when you have a very, very high variability in load. [e.g. Netflix]
Soyoustart 8G/8T for $69: http://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/
Soyoustart 96G/4T for $84: http://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/
Hetzner EX40 32G/6T for $64: https://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-prod...
LeaseWeb 16G/4T for $58: https://www.leaseweb.com/bare-metal-server/configure/18403
But honestly the best deal is generally:
https://robot.your-server.de/order/market
If you are patient, you can get it below 40 Euros there. I honestly tend to think of things at Hetzner's auction rates or Online.net's Specials because I can wait 30 days to add a new node because I use them for side projects.
If you are willing to downgrade to a Xeon E3-1245V2, they have 2 nodes for sale that are otherwise identical.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E3-1245+V...
vs.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2670+v...
Of course, since you can buy like 4 of these nodes vs. 1 Amazon EC2 one...even on a 3yr reserve...ya. Generally, per-node, EC2 has better per-core performance than what you can pick up in the "bargain market" but the fact you can pick up X:1 nodes guarantees it to be a non-issue.
1 year with $0 upfront and $293 a month (i.e. $3522 a year)
to
3 years with $5195 upfront and $0 a month (i.e. $144 a month)
I think that's a positive thing.
the concept that there's no room to compete against the market mindshare incumbent is a marketer's wet dream.
in other words, amazon does an amazingly effective job at marketing to people who think they aren't affected by marketing, and then get them to pay a massive premium to boot.
they truly are geniuses in this regard.
You've basically got two groups of people:
1) Those who can capacity plan accurately and relatively stable capacity needs. For this group, Amazon is a complete and total rip off. There is a skill floor to this, admittedly, in the form of a sysadmin/devops fellow with years of experience. [Hint: A large fraction of the SaaS providers who use Amazon are likely in this group if they had someone who met the skill floor for this option. I'll admit it is a skill floor because they need to be able to deploy a 1 or 3 Datacenter HA configuration without someone holding their hand.]
2) Those who have highly variable loads [Netflix] and/or lack the necessary experienced DevOps/Sysadmin type who can do capacity planning.
It's hard to get definite numbers from anyone, but they're all in about the same league.
My personal guess would be that EC2 is much bigger than OVH in the US, while OVH is almost certainly bigger than EC2 in Europe.
This ambiguity alone is the reason I and probably others will look elsewhere.
So there are a lot of metrics that are not ambiguous. Imagine if they told you that you get a "moderate" amount of RAM, and maybe it could be 4.5GB, or maybe it's 9GB.
There would be benefits if Amazon gave SLA style promises for these sorts of instances. When they see that they are falling short, they redistribute loads or add hardware to meet the promise. Otherwise it's generally somewhat meaningless because if you can't plan on it, you can't build a plan around it.