At $3.10/hr, these instances work out to $2k/mo. There are probably many more cost-effective options if you want a 2TB SSD server.

Since the benefit of using EC2 is that you can provision instances elastically, what are the sorts of scenarios in which one needs to provision high I/O servers elastically?

aws.amazon.com/1000genomes/

What I'm working on is mapping those short sequences (50-75 bases) to the genome and then either looking for mutations or expression levels (how many of those reads map to a particular location). There are a couple of ways to do the mapping, but most these days use either a big hash table or a Burrow Wheeler transform.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transfo...

This is raw file though, so once processed (but not yet analyzed) I believe we have sizes around 50 to 100GB (but that's not really what I work on so don't quote me fully on this).

Cloudburst (a hadoop based aligner) has a good description of an algorithm: sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/cloudburst-bio/index.p... Though they can get much more sophisticated and there are a number of open and closed source implementations...I only link this one because of the quality of the figure.

The data sets we work with in my group can be up 400gb's of compressed text for the reads from a single individual.

How often do we have to repeat this argument here on HN.

When running 24/7 then EC2 instances are 2-3x more expensive than the cheapest equivalent rent-server options and orders of magnitude more expensive than the physical hardware if you buy it.

The numbers have been recited countless times, I'm not digging them up yet again.

If you find a company that has reasonable support, reliable servers, good datacenters, and the minimal features required to debug issues remotely, then you are looking at prices fairly equivalent to those offered by EC2 heavy-utilization reserved instances (and are going to end up with a similar contract length anyway). If this somehow doesn't work out: call Amazon AWS's sales division and see if you are compelling enough for them to negotiate with (they totally have a sales division, and they really do "want your business").

Regardless, your choice of quote is really bothersome: "people like to claim" that EC2 is as expensive as their on-demand list prices, and that's a fact clearly demonstrable by the person I'm responding to (who is quite clearly and obviously claiming EC2 is more expensive than it really is) and one that is not defensible as the price you should be looking at is the heavy-utilization reserved pricing; if you'd like to respond to my comment "and is in fact quite price competitive" then you should quote that and adjust your argument appropriately.

Honestly, the history of HN is not much better (as I scour around trying to find the "numbers" you claim "have been recited countless times"). It is actually difficult to find people who don't claim that Amazon EC2 is more expensive than it is; I'm almost wondering if you and I are living on different versions of the site...

"EC2 is about 10-20 times more expensive than dedicated hosting. Even if reserved instances save us 22% over 3 years, it still doesn't even come close." -- cmer

^ No, EC2 reserved instances save you 71% over 3 years.

"It costs $576/mo to run an extra large EC2 instance fulltime" -- stephenjudkins

^ No, even two years ago (before "heavy utilization reserved instances") you could drop this price by 66% to $195.84/mo.

"With EC2 prices at about $0.10 per hour, I can't imagine ever using a service with such a high premium." -- apinstein

^ Obviously: no, but the fact that this person is angry about the price of a small instance at $72/mo is quite telling; he isn't willing to go lower than $20/mo.

I found a price comparison by vladd from earlier this year, comparing a high-end VPS to EC2's largest offering, coming up with a nearly 10x difference, but the server is entirely useless: it is a consumer-level product running non-ECC RAM. Later comments claim the same hosting company has "competitively priced servers with ECC ram".

A couple months ago I found a thread that linked to a fairly detailed argument[1] stating that EC2 instances are 2-3x more expensive than a VPS. However, this person again is performing a comparison with non-ECC hardware. What damns this comparison, however, is that he is not taking advantage of 3-year reserved instances for a long-term high-end use case: his numbers seem to be based on 49% off, when he can easily get 71% off, nearly a 2x difference. <- Again, EC2 is cheaper than people like to claim.

[1] codemonkeyism.com/dark-side-virtualized-servers-cloud...

Seriously: I can't find anyone who is actually doing legitimate comparisons of Amazon's offerings. People either compare EC2 to "I spent a week of time negotiating a deal to take over a bunch of hardware from a failing company down the street" (which, for the record, will also give you a great deal on chairs and office furniture: comparing the cloud to a fire sale is inane), assume "a server is a server is a server" and find "the cheapest" option (which seems to always have unreliable RAM), or (frankly: "and") fail to take into account Amazon's reserved instance discounts.

Sorry to break that for you but EC2 instances are in all likelihood not running on ECC-Ram either[1]. If they had ECC-Ram then Amazon would probably prominently advertise that or at least respond when they are directly asked. If you can find a link to prove the opposite then I'll take that back.

I would thereby love to see an honest comparison, and am happily willing to believe that I missed it: do you have a link to such?

You have probably already seen any of the blog-posts I could cite here, so I'll instead just try to wrap your two claims up:

1. You claim that dedicated servers are more labor intensive (setup, hardware failures) and require more staff. This is not my experience at all. In fact the complexity and idiosyncrasies of the AWS platform are much harder to abstract in the beginning, and no less labor intensive in the long term. You're just trading one set of problems (hardware issues) for a different one (cloud issues). What you may save on the hardware management front you have to spend on adapting your application for a cloud-environment.

2. You claim that equivalent hardware to an EC2 instance (with comparable performance, good support, network, etc.) would be roughly the same price as an EC2 instance. Sorry but that is laughable, when have you last time benchmarked an EC2 instance? Even a cheap rented dedicated server (hetzner, leasweb, ovh) will normally give you twice the bang for buck on every key metric (I/O, Ram, CPU). And this quickly raises to beyond an order of magnitude when you start comparing EBS to a local array or a 256G Ram box to 256G Ram in EC2-instances. Where redundancy is a concern you can usually quite literally buy two of each and still be cheaper than EC2.

I'll say what I always say: EC2 does have its place. However for deployments in the range of 10-~50 servers you will in pretty much all cases save a lot of money by sticking with dedicated servers for the base-load. That is unless your app needs the cloud-flexibility, of course (most apps don't).

What makes you believe this flexibility would come for free anyways? As all things it comes with a price-tag, and actually quite a hefty one in this case.

I've been dealing for long enough with hosters and hardware to know that nothing goes without saying.

Xeons and Opterons which only support ECC

Have you actually checked the CPU models they use? All I know is that amazon uses a range of different CPUs, and some Xeon/Opteron models do accept non-ECC Ram.

only be a few percent more expensive

In the past ECC DIMMs used to be significantly more expensive.

We were in the 5k/month ballpark for EC2, and cut it to under $600 with a few grand outlay for hardware spread over the course of a quarter.

Since we moved to EC2, updating is simpler. The service runs on a micro instance. We launch a large instance to do all the CPU- and IO-intensive processing that prepares the new dataset, then launch a new micro instance, upload the dataset, run a few smoke tests, and if all is well, cut over to it. Because we're doing it off line, we were able to optimize the data processing for speed rather than low resource usage, and cut the runtime down to 45 minutes.

1. Keeping your app on EC2 and working around the lack of high I/O options 2. Keeping your app somewhere else and working around the lack of EC2-style elasticity

In TFA, Netflix had chosen #1, and they used to run an extra memcached layer + I/O on 48 instances. They were able to bring this down to 15 I/O instances with no intervening cache, and lower overall latency.

That said, I'd guess the on-demand hi1.xlarge won't get a lot of usage; I imagine they offer it just for orthogonality's sake (all other instances are available both on-demand and reserved), plus the ability to try before you buy.

EDIT: Downvoted? Please offer your point of view.

8 x 3.4GHz E3-1270

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