For the EC2/CloudX,Y,Z users here. Have you compared your cost with the cost of running your own cloud on top of dedicated servers from a traditional provider?<p>I know that with EC2 you can "follow" your requirements and start/stop instances, but even by considering a perfect predicting tool which would cut 50% of my instance requirements with EC2, I am still cheaper having 2 times more hardware than needed with my traditional provider.<p>I pay $150/month for the equivalent of a high memory extra large instance. I can ask to have them in different data centers all linked together within a private lan (VLAN). I look again and again, I never reach the point where it would be cheaper to run in the "public" cloud. I run my own cloud with KVM/Ganeti.<p>I think the cloud is nice if you really have a system which can follow your demand over the day/week but you need to be quite big for it to start to save you money. You can go a very long way on a single box...
Interesting, so they are comparing to the OnDemand pricing of AWS, not including that 3-year reserved instances on AWS are somewhere in the ballpark of 48% cheaper, BUT, they have this footnote at the bottom of the pricing page that seems like a really interesting differentiating approach[1]:<p><pre><code> No Charge For Data Transfer Up To 20TB Per Month Per
Account. 100TB free data transfer for customers over
500GB memory
</code></pre>
On AWS, 20TB == 2,000GB * $0.10/GB (avg) = $200<p>and I suppose if you have enough SmartMachines on lease that you are pushing 500GB+ total of memory in your account, they up that to 100TB of transfer.<p>It looks like overages are a fairly reasonable $0.08/GB[2]<p>I think we are finally witnessing bandwidth becoming a race-to-0 for big cloud providers and I love it (I know there have been prediction-papers here on HN before about how it will eventually become free or near-free, it is just interesting to see the different ways we can get there). Best of luck to Joyent and it's great to see another strong competitor in this area!<p>ASIDE: Anyone have a geographical map of the data center locations you can deploy in the Joyent Cloud? One of the big appeals of AWS is having decent global coverage and I am trying to find more information about that form their site with no luck at the moment...<p>UPDATE: For anyone interested, just got this back from the Joyent team about the location of the data centers:<p><pre><code> We launched today with two datacenters. WEST is in
Emeryville CA and SW is Las Vegas NV.
Inside of my.joyentcloud.com you will have a choice of
datacenters when provisioning a server.
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing-comparison/smartos-linux/" rel="nofollow">http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing-comparison/smart...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/smartmachines-2/options/" rel="nofollow">http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/smartmachines-2/options/</a>
Performance claims and DTrace support aside, the costs are similar for instance-hours for low to medium-sized instances.<p>But completely different if you are doing more than 15GB of outgoing bandwidth: <i>"No Charge For Data Transfer Up To 20TB Per Month Per Account"</i><p><a href="http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing-comparison/smartos-linux/" rel="nofollow">http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing-comparison/smart...</a>
As their default (and quite interesting) offering is SmartOS, I'd like to ask if someone has some recent experience with (Open)Solaris networking. I still remember the day when it (especially its x86 incarnation) was renowned for having syscalls that were slow as molasses – IIRC, actually a big boon for the then-fledgling Linux.<p>How does it fare at memory allocation, especially under load? How good is their select successor (i.e. their equivalent to epoll/kqueue)?
Looks like a good competitor for AWS. I think as a customer it is always good to have some high quality competition amongst the vendors. This will push AWS to try to replicate or better the features being offered by them and also keep them from raising their prices too much.<p>The list of customers for the joyent cloud looks quite impressive. So this might already have been tested quite thoroughly by these customers and doesn't look like as if it is launching just now.<p>I think they should introduce a free tier like AWS's micro instance to allow ppl to test drive this new cloud.
Their regular pricing page and their EC2 comparison page don't seem to match. One example - On the regular pricing page, XL has 32GB of memory, 760GB of disk, and costs $1.12 per hour. On their EC2 comparison page, in two places XL has 16GB of memory, 480GB of disk, and costs $0.64 per hour. In another place on that page it has 8GB of RAM and 240GB of disk and costs $0.64 per hour.
Pricing page is 404.
Cached here, though obscuring the lower end of the price range:
<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Y7ZEmSCDbJQJ:www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing/smartmachine-pricing/" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Y7ZEmSC...</a>
Qemu-KVM + SPL + puppet + some monitoring? Yeah, Amazon should start looking for a PANIC-button. ^_^<p>Update: Oh, come on. I've clicked to the TECHNOLOGY link and what I saw instead of technology review is load of BS. SmartMachines? OK, even I know that one should market any crap with Smart or Easy or Eco or LowFat prefix in it, because, you now, I have a SmartMachine... OK, fine. But what about technology?<p>Instead of writing that you're building a solution based on fast, light-weight, low-overhead, in-kernel, native virtualization system and RedHat supported libvirt stack, that you're co-sponsoring and actively participating in development process, and here is our contribution and so on, I see loads of BS. KVM is faster than Xen? I know that, thank you. I have a KVM instances running on my Laptop. ^_^<p>You're using ZFS? Linux native port? FUSE? So, you're active developer and tester? Co-sponsor? You have hired or supporting active developers? Providing a feedback to community? No? You just trying to sell me something you called a SmartMachine, OK, fine. I don't buy it. ^_^