Will Amazon AWS save me money?

One of this first questions we asked when deciding to sue Amazon’s AWS services was: Will we save money?

At first, your EC2 servers may be simply architected, perhaps small instances. Once a more serious commitment is made for a more robust architecture at Amazon, there will be additional costs introduced. For example, a small instance, running a 2 disk 100GB EBS volume w/RAID0 plus monitoring and a static IP, and the cost goes from the current ~$68 monthly per system to ~$88 monthly per system. Bump the instances to large instances (likely needed for any server running mysql, or any other equally intensive application) and that cost goes to ~$265 per instance. Add in the costs of the additional services like bandwidth, Static IP, Cloudwatch etc and the costs can quickly escalate. Of course, upfront payments for Reserved Instances can drastically reduce the costs further.

However, the savings in development and deployment costs I think far outweighs a narrower gap in the savings between physical and AWS servers, and the real MRC on the AWS servers will likely be lower for a given amount of computing resources.

So- can you save money? Yes. In some cases, it will be a direct apples to oranges savings of hard dollars. In other cases, the agility gained will provide the greatest savings. In most cases- a combination of both will drive your cost savings.

To learn more about how operating in the cloud can save your company money, contact us for a free consultation.