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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes feel like I'm the only one using EC2 as it was intended.

S3stat's nightly job takes about 60 hours to run, and it needs to start and finish between 3am and 6am every morning. Amazon kindly keeps 20 machines ready to do that for me and only charges the time I'm actually using them. That's pretty amazing, and well worth the price in my mind.

So yeah, if you need a box to run your webserver 24/7/365, you can find a better deal elsewhere. But that's really never been what EC2 is for. To continue the example, S3stat.com lives in a cage at a colo since, as the author points out, that's a much better deal than running it on EC2.

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It's in the name, of course: Elastic Compute Cloud. If you need a static cloud, it's not for you.

> So yeah, if you need a box to run your webserver 24/7/365, you can find a better deal elsewhere. But that's really never been what EC2 is for.

What Amazon offering is? This is AWS we're talking about. They have a service solution for nearly everything. You're saying in 2013 they still don't have a service for 24/7/365 website hosting?

I know you were asking for effect, but of course they do and it's EC2. That's why they have a heavy reservation pricing tier, which only makes sense for 24/7/365 (you pay for hours even if you don't use them).

But, it's fun to point at "elastic" and tell people they're "doing it wrong" because they don't take a name chosen 7 years ago literally. As if somehow the service (called EC2 virtually everywhere -- not Elastic Cloud Compute) could never evolve beyond that initial use case. Incidentally, the "elastic" in EBS must have a different meaning because one of its primary selling points is that it's persistent storage.

>But, it's fun to point at "elastic" and tell people they're "doing it wrong" because they don't take a name chosen 7 years ago literally.

It's not an arbitrary name, elasticity is a defining concept of "cloud".

>As if somehow the service (called EC2 virtually everywhere -- not Elastic Cloud Compute) could never evolve beyond that initial use case.

EC2 is one tool. There are other tools in the Amazon box for other use cases [0] and other boxes from other providers entirely.

>Incidentally, the "elastic" in EBS must have a different meaning because one of its primary selling points is that it's persistent storage.

It's elastic because you can allocate and deallocate rapidly and pay only for what's allocated at a given time.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5819017

In other words they took a system targeted especially at people who needed on-demand computing and as it got popular, adapted it to the needs of the 24/7/365 web-hosting by offering an alternate pricing model, point-and-click user interfaces and additional features and services like EBS and CloudWatch.

The point is absolutely not that EC2 never evolved beyond its initial use case and isn't good at other things.

The point is that while they have 24/7/365 hosting services, there's never been any reason to expect that they would be better at it than anyone else. So why do we continue to see blog posts about not liking EC2 with vague complaints about the horrible price-to-performance ratio getting lots of upvotes?

Because EC2 still seems to be a lot of people's default option for 24/365 servers, even though it isn't particularly good for it. Why is that so? Evidently there haven't been enough blog posts on the subject yet!

Presumably, the elasticity in EBS is in the amount of storage. Rather as the elasticity in EC2 is in the amount of compute.

Depends on what you mean by "hosting". If all you need to do is serve content, CloudFront+S3 will suffice.

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