IaaS Or VPS Part 3 – Up And Running
Overview
Part 2 looked at the differences of AWS/IaaS to VPS. Part 3 will be looking at the cost after a period of time.
Running Report
The Amazon Web Services have been running for over 3 months with February running the full month at all times coming to a total cost of £17.23. All the costs are associated with EC2 as the RDS server was still under the one year free trial. If RDS was chargeable it would probably cost more than a single Linode but the benefit of Amazon is the servers are on different servers where as the Linode server is running all the services.
For a 12 month period the minimum projected cost would be £206.76 but increased usage will push the traffic and IOPs up as well.
In this process I have switched my blog to run on AWS full time, retiring the Linode server it use to run on. This will give a true picture of the costs and performance. In the process I have had to add Elastic IP so that it can be used in the A DNS record.
Future Changes
Further investigation shows that there are differences between EBS and S3 storage. They include:
- EBS higher failure rate than S3. The risk is affect by the size of EBS (larger the more risk).
- S3 has additional charges for GET and PUT requests where as EBS is charged by IOPS
- EBS can only be mounted by one EC2 instance where as S3 allows multiple access.
- S3 has a high latency than EBS
The above highlights the need to use S3 where it’s used for backup (EC2/EBS allows snapshots) or use S3 as the disk storage. All of these will of course increase the running costs.
One of the hurdles of moving resources / media to S3 is the existing links in post. S3 and CloudFront services allow CDN capabilities. There are plugins which allows the current “Add Media” button to function normally but to S3 but it would leave half on the EBS disk attached to the EC2 instance and new items on S3.
Summary
Since migrating to AWS it will be the true test of the cost V.S performance and see if there are any issues which was not caught from an idling website. I will post another article which will include running on IaaS full time.
