[Systems] EC2 cost estimates

[Bernie Innocenti]

Amazon just lowered all prices, do I did some some cost estimates for
the hypothesis of running the bulk of Sugar Labs' public-facing and
development infrastructure on EC2.

In 9 days, the machine running http://activities.sugarlabs.org/ along
with a bunch of other low-traffic services received 85.8GB and sent
103.3GB of data, for a total of 189GB transferred.

In one year, this would become 189/9*365 = 7665GB (7.6TB).

However, these statistics were collected in a period of extraordinarily
low traffic, because schools are closed in Latin America:

 http://sunjammer.sugarlabs.org/munin/sugarlabs.org/sunjammer.sugarlabs.org-apache_accesses.html

Within two weeks, traffic will return from 150 to 800-1000 connections
per minute, a factor 6. Our traffic includes a number of things, such as
backups, which won't grow as much. But we're also expecting the
popularity of aslo to increase over the next year, so I'd keep the 6x
factor:

  76665GB * 6 = 45990GB (46TB per year)

We're well within the 10TB per month range. So we can expect to spend:

  45990 * 0.15 = $6898.50

This is just for bandwidth. Amazon also charges for instance hours
(circa $2000 per year per instance), disk space and IP addresses. This
is the whole story:

 http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing

Depending how fast one instance really is, I'd guesstimate that running
a good chunk of Sugar Labs' development and public-facing infrastructure
on EC2 instances would cost some $10-15K per year. Moving everything to
the cloud would likely cost over $20K per year at current rates.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/