Re: [Wonder-disc] Community Roadmap

[Paul H. <pa...@lo...>]

On 26/02/2012, at 12:40 AM, Aaron Rosenzweig wrote:

> A question about the free Amazon experience... That is only free for  
> the first year correct? After that you need to pay correct?

Yes, basically.  (You also need to be a _new_ customer.  You can't be an existing customer and add the free usage tier onto resources you're already paying for.)

http://aws.amazon.com/free/

> 1) I'm more comfortable with FreeBSD, I also feel it handles Ram much  
> more efficiently, etc. In other words, I feel it does more with less.

I'm a FreeBSD fan from way back, but, honestly, I'm not sure I'd run it on EC2 even if I could.  The "Amazon Linux" AMIs are maintained by AWS, guaranteed to work with EC2, kept patched, up-to-date and secure.
  
> 2) the costs are more clear. Amazon doesn't seem "expensive" per-se  
> but less clear.

It certainly is harder to predict costs with AWS/EC2 if you can't predict your usage.  There's a usage calculator:

http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

If you know your app will be up for a year (or longer), reserved instances will significantly reduce the cost of running an instance 24/7.

> On the other hand, the Amazon cloud services are more special and  
> flexible. You can test out a new server and alternate config for a few  
> hours or a few days with only spending a few bucks.

That certainly is one of the biggest wins.  The server becomes just another (disposable!) resource.


-- 
Paul.

http://logicsquad.net/