Much has been spoken about the benefits of cloud providers, particularly Amazon EC2. But do they really stack up on cost?
We are a supporter of the whole cloud movement (real cloud that is – not just those marketeers that call ASP ‘Cloud’) as we think it yields great benefits. Cost is one, but there is a far greater benefit – flexibility. We’ve taken established SaaS providers from managed datacentres, through Co-Lo and onto cloud. The systems team said it could not be done. We did it in 6 weeks. And guess what?
- Costs were way lower at first – but when we realised we could spin up twice the infrastructure as before, we did – it made sense to be doubly scalable and fault tolerant for the same price
- We created a new breed of sys-admins – they were developer centric and applied their experience to architecture and software design (infinitely better than red tape)
- Releases happened faster – when a dev environment was needed, it was created in minutes and used for as long as needed
- Developers actually wanted a faster cycle! They wanted to try out new features (go see our MVP articles – fits perfectly)
So what are we saying? The cost of EC2 and others will only drop – Amazon, for example, is introducing new price plans alongside new features all the time. But that’s not the real win. The ability to react, interweave the principles of MVP with agile development and have sys-admins that are developer centric is where it is at.
Hats off to those datacentre guys that make this happen. It’s truly a revolution in software delivery.
7 responses to "Is EC2 really that cost effective?"
Spot on. Great post
Keep posting stuff like this i really like it
I’ve recently started a blog, the information you provide on this site has helped me tremendously. Thank you for all of your time & work.
I know you probably have to disagree, but if you can’t beat them, join them.
Goes both ways! I am sure there are a great deal of developers who think that EC2 helps them get closer to the systems team, and also vice versa. What with the advent of BeanStalk and PaaS it is a fast moving space, and much opportunity for CV enhancing projects, whichever side of the fence you live on!
A cool blog post there mate ! Cheers for posting !
Great article. Waiting for more.