Pbhardwaj
especially when the reasoning is that of costs. S3 IA may cost more when accessing, but still better than outbound traffic costs for EC2 and EBS…perhaps someone could give a sample comparison of costs ?
1 Answers
David Markus
I agree with Phbardwaj. One requirement was that the solution should be scalable. Well… a single EC2 instance + EBS volumes doesn’t scale very well… Wheres S3-IA does… I guess "the lowest possible AWS cost" outweighs scalability in this case.
Hey, i also wondered this, I tend to agree that the two are kind of similar in cost as i believe you will pay about the same transfer costs out of S3 and out of EC2 for the data leaving AWS to the internet. The cost of access for infrequent access is there but the development cost and operational overhead of EC2 + EBS + custom FTP client development and maintanence of them may outweigh the S3 infrequent access class access costs. If positioned with this scenario in the real world I would value the time that it would take to build the custom FTP solution as a cost as well as any maintanance and overhead of the instance. In my head this makes S3 a more attractive second solution from a CapEx and OpEx perspective than the EC2 solution. (in my opinion a customer would be more frustrated with a FTP client in their game launcher that is hitting a single EC2 instance in some region not neccassarily close to them, and have the FTP download die if you instance cant handle spikes in traffic, or have issues with EBS reads etc… S3 solves a major amount of those problems and the IA tier access cost does not seem prohibitive. A failed download may result in them not playing your game at all, versus paying a tiny bit more to make sure they get it.) But i still think the bittorrent approach is the best.