Deployment - $72 a month?

Hey there,

So when I first looked at using amazon I ran through their cost calculator tool. My needs are extremely modest as I expect very little traffic, thusly I took all the lowend options.

The cost was estimated at approx $22-$24 a month, I forget exactly, but uploading through cloud foundry my costs were $72 a month...I didn't see a lot of options exposed through the CF interface, is that really the base amount I would be looking at or does CF assume some settings that are driving the cost of the amazon hosting?

Hi!

If I understand correctly you came to the the $22-$24 figure by multiplying the lowest reserved instance price ($0.03/hr) by the number of hours in the month. We take the standard on-demand instance price ($0.10) and do the same, that's how we came up with $72/mo.

When you reserve an instance with Amazon (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances/) there are two things to consider:
1. One-time fee you need to pay to Amazon ($227.50 for 1 year, $350 for 3 years for the small instance)
2. Reserved Instances are reserved in a particular region and availability zone. There are three availability zones in the "us-east" region, and when we call AWS to start an instance on your behalf, we don't know in which availability zone it will be started, Amazon handles the zone assignment.

So, even if you reserve an instance with Amazon, and then use CloudFoundry to deploy your application, there's only a 1-in-3 chance that your reservation will be honored.

We plan to provide our users with more control over the location of their instances, but at the moment we don't really support the reserved instances.

Also, please keep in mind that $72/mo (or $22/mo for that matter) is just an estimate, and it does not account for the network between the Internet and your instance(s), or data storage fees (for S3 or EBS). See http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing for more details.

I hear what you are saying, right now I am reconsidering using AWS.

I think my needs are too modest. Even if I decide that $72 is fine, when I try to point my domain to the AWS solution I hit the need for naming servers, I need two of them so now I can (I think) pay a third party to manage that for me or I fire up two more servers on AWS and deal with configuring the software as well as the added cost.

The main benefits of AWS seem to be the scalability and all the 'elastic" infrastructure but the traffic I expect on my little site could be handled by a 12 year old P75 machine running windows :)

Having said all that, in regards to Cloud Foundry, the experience of taking a grails application from my dev machine to AWS via CF was pretty good. Considering it was my first day of even knowing AWS existed, I had not read all the documentation yet but was still able to get my app there and connect to it. Very impressive,so, good job.

Is their any roadmap outlining when reserved instances may be supported?

I would be interested in taking advantage of CloudFoundry once reserved instances are supported (Unless vmware has an even better deal!)

There is a JIRA issue to support reserved instances.
The main requirement is to allow the user to pick an availability zone (where they have purchased reserved instances).
Currently, you could launch with an EBS volume (that belongs to an AZ) in order to run in a given AZ. That will generally work.