[Systems] EC2 cost estimates

[Daniel Clark]

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 7:36 AM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
> 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.

Is there any way CPU-intensive tasks could be shifted to $elsewhere
while bandwidth-intensive tasks stay at current
bandwidth-is-free-and-plentiful locations?

-- 
Daniel JB Clark | Free Software Activist | http://pobox.com/~dclark