Amazon EC2 freezes Moore's law
The power of an Amazon EC2 small instance has remained the same for years http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types
With EC2 there is no steady increase each year in computing power. It's like Moore's law has been frozen in time. EC2 server instances are looking decidedly old and underpowered.
Amazon gets all the benefit of hardware costs decreasing and computing power increasing over time, but no increase in power gets passed through to EC2 users.
Very sad. Slow old cloud computing servers are starting to make running your own powerful modern, cheap, fast servers look attractive.
Will cloud computing vendors start to seriously compete on computing power?
46 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] thread(Disclaimer: I use my linode for just about freakin' everything)
No diff in utilization. You can still use the API elastically spin up new instances, if at a different scale.
>...$features..
I guess, if that sort of thing matters to you. I don't really like relying on third parties for utilities like that.
> If all you need is VPS, then Linode is really the best option available.
K, but has anybody been making their machines faster?
> I guess, if that sort of thing matters to you. I don't really like relying on third parties for utilities like that. It may matter for your project, if you need automatic-elasticity, more durable off-instance storage, better security, more compute power, more memory. Linode can't provide these features.
> K, but has anybody been making their machines faster? Sure, EC2 has upgraded their m1 hardware the past couple of years, GoGrid is upgrading to Westmere later this year, Storm on Demand has upgraded some of their hardware, Flexiscale has upgraded, and others.
And cloud instances aren't precisely that, albeit generalized and abstracted further?
Amazon's cut prices, and the high end of their offerings have gone up. Yes, they're going to take a disproportionate share of the benefits from speed if they can get away with it. They also took all the risk on the outlay and used to charge comparatively less per dollar of provisioned hardware when they bought those chips. So I don't think they're ripping anyone off, yet.
If it becomes a bad deal, people are free to go elsewhere - likely quite easily, what with EC2's architecture.
My post was approx 20% meta question, 80% substantive, by word count.
And getting back to the subject, are you aware of any companies that have been upgrading their servers beyond just RAM (such as linode)?
The griping and passive-aggressive comments are what's causing the down votes. Cut it out
As for the price cuts, at the small-medium size ranges, the cuts haven't been extensive, and certainly not to the same scale as what Moore's law would indicate. The new options at the high-end aren't an upgrade if they cost more (which is in fact the case).
At present the best deal I've been able to find in terms of $/performance has been Linode, but they aren't the most reliable in the world so far.
At present, it's more economical (if you don't need programmatic elastic expansion of your cluster) to rent/lease dedicated hardware or set up your own. This is because hardware has been getting faster than they have been upgrading.
>Competition drives the performance improvements coming out of Intel and AMD, and competition will drive the rate at which savings are passed along to the consumer in cloud service providers.
The point of this discussion is that this hasn't happened yet with any known majors beyond RAM upgrades and small amounts of price-twiddling.
I'd prefer people say as little as is needed to spur thought and conversation without directing me to some ghetto blogspot page that lurched into existence a week prior.
Offering smaller instances is a good thing for a variety of reasons from simple cost savings when you don't need much to efficiently slicing up arbitrary hardware for embarassingly parallel compute jobs.
The only thing that is changing is parallel processing. So amazon is still selling a single CPU, and that single CPUs speed has hardly changed in years.
You should get more memory and disk space though.
If that doesn't seem like much, you also have to consider that other costs of providing the service may increase to offset hardware savings due to Moore's law. Think of the networking hardware, energy required to cool the datacenter, bandwidth, HVAC repair and maintenance, real estate, staffing, insurance. These costs are not likely to decrease at the same rate as computer hardware costs, and some, like rent and payroll actually increase.
moore's law is about the level of modern hardware capabilities. what servers amazon uses isn't going to affect that much.
The newer m2 instances use x5550 Nehelem hardware and perform quite well. You'll generally get the most compute power for the money with an m2.xlarge instance (6.5 ECUs) which generally performs much better than the supposedly 20 ECU c1.xlarge Xeon E5410 instance. m2.xlarge can generally be had for around $0.17-0.30/hr (spot pricing) which is very reasonable for 17GB ram (compare to Rackspace Cloud $0.96/hr for 16GB cloud server running on less powerful Opteron 2374 hardware).
If you are interested in other providers, I've done a complete specs/performance/price analysis of 20 different cloud providers including EC2 here: http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma...
Amazon is one of the few businesses I'm aware of that goes out of its way to keep its profit margin consistent, to the point of regularly lowering the price it charges for its AWS offerings.
It's in their best interest to do so in the long run. Sure, they could fix prices and watch as a 1U EC2 instance gets more profitable over time and 100GB S3 bucket does the same, but eventually somebody else would build a business by squeezing in at a lower price.
As it stands, Amazon has the Cloud game beaten. They're just miles ahead of the next guy. Since the only reason to consider switching is price, it's a genius move on their part to keep walking the price down. If you want to beat them, you have to figure out how to build a better product and squeak it in cheaper.
I just don't see that happening.
If you want power, you can certainly get it.
I don't think the economics work out for that. There have been price cuts, and I bet there will be more as Amazon pays off the hardware. Once their investment is amortized and the infrastructure is paid for, at that point the only costs on the balance sheet are the operating costs and prices would bottom out.
Worth pointing out too is that Moore's law governs transistors/cm2/$, not CPU speed as such. Thus Amazon could take advantage of Moore's law simply to fit more instances on a given chip. They may not necessarily pass these lower costs onto the customer _as rate decreases_ if the current rates are competitive in the market, and at the moment they appear to be - why would Amazon bite into their own profit margins for no reason?
I have a pet theory (which I think leads to wrong conclusions at the moment, but hey) that once CPU becomes a utility, Jevons paradox will apply and prices will start to decrease more slowly as opposed to collapsing like it has to date. FWIW I wrote the thing up here: http://ianso.blogspot.com/2010/05/jevons-paradox-moores-law-...
The point is that amazon pricing is fairly static. You get X for $Y. However as the years go by, the value of X decreases yet you are still charged $Y. So basically going to a hosted service I might get a significantly faster machine for my buck. Sure it won't scale as quickly but that might be a minor issue, pick your battles so to speak.
Amazon needs to take into account this, and instead of upgrading everything, just start deflating prices of the old and buying newer hardware every 2 years or so and charging full price for the new hardware. This keeps them well balanced with technology. In the end this just means that instead of buying 1 server, you will buy 2 for the same price outdated servers and vuala.
However thats not quite how servers work and its not like their cost-for-operations is going down with the years as well.
Will cloud computing compete over computing power? That depends, does anyone turn to cloud computing for serious computing performance?