[fpp]

Their example dedicated host adds up to $2'226 per month - had a quick calc on the retail HW cost for a machine like this - should not be more than $6.5k with 2 * E5-2670 v3 12 cores.

What I understand so far - it is physically bundling a fixed amount of virtual machines to a physical host - in the example "dedicated host" 22 * m4.large.

Bundling your virtual machine to one or a series of physical hosts / on the same network segment is a service you can have from quite a few hosting providers (if you ask).

If you opt for a solution like this, it is also most likely that you will run an enterprise scale solution and you will do so for quite some time - at least 6 months upwards.

Keeping that in mind together with a lifetime of at least 2 years for such HW, you will be paying 8 times the HW cost for a 2y lifetime for a management layer (storage / connectivity you pay per GB with EC2).

I guess everybody will have to see how this fits into their business model for non volatile / predictable resource demand or a set of when physical iron might be a better choice (colo or rent).

[cstejerean]

You are looking at their on-demand rates, which means no commitment. You can do this for a month or even a few days. If you know you will need infra for 1 year or more you can use reserved rates. Right now those are not yet publicly available for Dedicated Instances, although the post mentions you can contact them if you want early access. With reserved rates the price should be 70% less for a 3 year commitment (speculating based on the post). A huge difference.

[vidarh]

But I can still for most things get lower prices on a month by month basis than the price a 3 year commitment to Amazon gets you. And that's before paying their outright extortionate bandwidth prices.

[brianwawok]

What if the license of the software you want to run is 100k per physical host? Then being able to run 2 or 4 instances on the same physical host makes the $2226 cost pretty insignificant.

[dsr_]

If you have software that costs that much, you will want to run it on hardware optimized for that software. (Does it want lots of GPU cores? I/O? Raw computrons? Does it prefer more cores or more GHz/core?) Unless Amazon happens to have exactly what you want available, you'll be better off putting it in a lab or datacenter.

[vosper]

Except, of course, that for anything important you'll want redundancy and failover in the face of hardware failure, so you'll need two of those $6.5k servers.

[idlewords]

The same (kind of specious) argument applies to the AWS case.