PHP App Engine

http://4sysops.com/archives/amazon-ec2-pricing-for-dummies-part-1-only-pay-for-what-you-use/

The first thing I did after a closer look at Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), was to check-out its pricing. I have read everywhere that cloud computing is such a cost saver, so I was curious to know how much it would actually cost to run a virtual server at EC2.

the whole series

http://public.sheet.zoho.com/public/gevaperry/european-amazon-reserved-instances-savings-calculator

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=874283

Oh and housing, power and staff aren’t free either. Neither are the premium support contracts with your various suppliers to get same-day replacements for failed hardware.

Once you factor everything in you’ll realize that EC2 is not nearly as expensive as it may seem at a glance.

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=26865

The usage reports show the internal naming for the usage types we meter from the service, whereas the bill and the http://aws.amazon.com/s3 page show the customer friendly names. Here’s the translation…

C3DataTransfer-In-Bytes is data transferred from EC2 to S3
C3DataTransfer-Out-Bytes is data transferred from S3 to EC2
DataTransfer-Out-Bytes is data transferred out of S3 (non-EC2)
DataTransfer-In-Bytes is data transferred in to S3 (non-EC2)
Requests-Tier1 is for PUT , COPY, POST , or LIST requests
Requests-Tier2 is for GET and all other requests (except DELETE)
Requests-NoCharge is for DELETE requests
TimedStorage-ByteHrs is for storage

More on Billing:

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?messageID=149952

Its great that I can download my billing reports in both CSV and XML format. But for the life of me I can not find a schema that precisely describes the billing reports (with its namespace, etc.). My boss is an accounting business manager and he does not write code as a developer but he’s got a technical background and he asked me for a document from AWS on how to read billing reports. He reports to the CFO and therefore he needs to know how to parse these reports. I find it surprising that Amazon hasn’t made a simple schema available or some sort of document for non-developers to help them understand how to interpret billing report. For example where is the XML schema for this excerpted EC2 billing report?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1530613/recommended-ec2-ami-for-high-traffic-php-web-service

What AMI is recommended for my setting (high traffic PHP web service?) It needs to support millions of requests a day. I need an OS that can be easily maintained by non expert + NGinx and my entire configuration + Security and other essential management features.

Simple question. No answers.

http://www.barkingseal.com/2009/03/benchmarking-drupal-on-amazon-ec2/

One of the questions we often help clients answer is: which EC2 instance size provides the best performance-per-cost for a given application? I recently did some load testing with a few different sample web configurations, including a “stock” Drupal installation… here are the results

(Medium instance wins)

http://friendfeed.com/jungleg/059f38f1/bear-with-me-as-i-take-down-my-ec2-to-convert-it

thought amazon converted them automatically?
Sadly no, and it cost me a month to find out. I’m writing a blog post about it.

http://community.citrix.com/display/ocb/2008/09/27/Cloud+Economics+101+-+Part+1

On the surface it’s apparent that EC2 is significantly more expensive if the set up is utilized 24×7x365, even a 40 hour week yields a slightly higher cost. So where is all the savings ? What’s all the hype about ?

http://blog.bitbucket.org/2009/10/04/on-our-extended-downtime-amazon-and-whats-coming/

As many of you are well aware, we’ve been experiencing some serious downtime the past couple of days. Starting Friday evening, our network storage became virtually unavailable to us, and the site crawled to a halt.

We’re hosting everything on Amazon EC2, aka. “the cloud”, and we’re also using their EBS service for storage of everything from our database, logfiles, and user data (repositories.)

They were DDOSed and neither them nor Amazon had a clue for 20+ hours.

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/10/4-tips-avoid-vm-sprawl-in-public-cloud.html

Welcome to the dark side of cloud computing—the world of VM sprawl.

With the newfound ability to launch servers on-demand comes the critical responsibility to shut them down when they are no longer serving their purpose. When people do their ROI analysis and embark on the cloud adventure, however, they aren’t often considering the responsibility part of this equation. Newcomers to the cloud generally find it very easy to start up servers but very hard to shut them down. The result is a cloud infrastructure with an unfortunate number of pointless servers.

Yep. That’s how amazon makes their money.