Amazon's solution to its over-provisioning problem seems pretty clever, but I wonder what happens to its rented servers over the holiday season when they're actually needed by the company. Does Amazon limit the amount of servers that are rented during this time? Do they simply raise the cost of renting them? It seems like it'd be very inconvenient for a company making use of Amazon's service to have to shut down or limit their web traffic for a couple of months every year.
ferozenaina
Amazon EC2 has two pricing categories - On-Demand which is guaranteed capacity and Spot Instances where you use the spare EC2 capacity. Spot instances are usually 30%+ cheaper and I have noticed that the Spot Instance price fluctuates wildly around peak seasons.
The On-Demand price is constant. In fact, one of the main incentive for websites to use EC2 is to cheaply scale and handle peak traffic during holiday seasons.
Amazon's solution to its over-provisioning problem seems pretty clever, but I wonder what happens to its rented servers over the holiday season when they're actually needed by the company. Does Amazon limit the amount of servers that are rented during this time? Do they simply raise the cost of renting them? It seems like it'd be very inconvenient for a company making use of Amazon's service to have to shut down or limit their web traffic for a couple of months every year.
Amazon EC2 has two pricing categories - On-Demand which is guaranteed capacity and Spot Instances where you use the spare EC2 capacity. Spot instances are usually 30%+ cheaper and I have noticed that the Spot Instance price fluctuates wildly around peak seasons.
The On-Demand price is constant. In fact, one of the main incentive for websites to use EC2 is to cheaply scale and handle peak traffic during holiday seasons.